Hello,

sorry for what are probably silly questions, I have difficulties wrapping
my head around how installation works. I am attaching my current
configuration, copy-pasted from our Overdrive machines and augmented
by snippets from yours, Vagrant.

Right now I am on Debian with Guix as package manager, running from the
SD card. After reading up through the last half year of guix-devel and
help-guix, I realise that I could have followed
   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2020-04/msg00051.html ;
apparently
   guix system disk-image -e "(@ (gnu system install) novena-installation-os)"
executed on an aarch64 machine should have created a bootable SD card
image with only Guix. Something to try next time! (By the way, swapping
the micro-SD card is rather finicky on this board, and I try to avoid it).

On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 11:33:22AM -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> Yes, I would recommend installing Guix System directly to SATA, since
> u-boot can boot from SATA partitions marked bootable (either MBR or GPT
> though what GPT calls it I forget), and SATA will perform better, of
> course.

So far, I am using an external USB disk, which probably is not in the
boot sequence.
This is why the configuration has this:
  (bootloader (bootloader-configuration
               (bootloader u-boot-novena-bootloader)
               (target "/dev/mmcblk1")))
to boot from the SD card. By the way, why /dev/mmcblk1, which also appears
in the installation-os? Is this valid when an additional SATA disk is plugged
in? My SD card is called /dev/mmcblk0, and there are several partitions;
do I give /dev/mmcblk0 or /dev/mmcblk0p1 as the argument?

Then later I have:
  (file-systems (cons* (file-system
                         (device (uuid "f1062993-3776-47d2-8900-9e4f1d9fc8aa")) ; /dev/sda1
                         (mount-point "/")
                         (type "ext4"))
                       %base-file-systems))
so that the store and everything else should be on the disk.

Will this separation work?

Will mounting /dev/sda1 to /mnt and issuing "guix system init config.scm /mnt"
work? (The handbook suggests to do "herd start cow-store /mnt", but I forgot
what this is needed for.) Will it populate only /mnt/gnu/store, or also
/gnu/store from the place where I call "guix system init"? Since the latter
is almost full.

Thanks for your enlightenment,

Andreas