How to partition manually and still have a working system?

[frandavid100]

Hi there,

I hope you can help me on this. I recently bought an Asus UX31A ultrabook and it seems to have an EFI (or UEFI, not sure about the nomenclature) boot, which I'm unfamiliar with.

I have been partitioning manually for years before installing the system, because I like to have my home partition separate from the root one. However, if I partition this particular computer manually like I always used to (a small ext4 partition for root, a swap partition and a large ext4 partition for home) the system won't boot.

Letting the installer do its thing and use the whole drive gives me a working system, but as I said, I'd prefer a separate /home. So, is there a howto or some instructions I could follow in order to partition successfully?

Thanks guys.

---------- Post added at 02:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:24 AM ----------

As reference, this is how Fedora seems to be doing the partitioning if I leave it by itself:



It seems that the root, home and swap partitions are located in a physical volume, but it seems curious that they don't have a mount point. Is there a way to partition manually and set how much each volume takes, as well as formatting the root partition at each install but not the home partition?

[mikee]

Hi.
Are you sure those aren't mounted? What does the "df" command show?
The way newer linuxes work is with volume management.
you have "physical volumes", volume groups, and logical volumes.
The logical volumes are where the filesystems go. It's easier to manage then messing with partitions.
If you run out of space, you can add a new physical volume to the pool, and then grow the space where
the filesystem is.

/usr/sbin/pvs or /usr/sbin/pvdisplay will show the physical volume(s).
/usr/sbin/vgs or /usr.sbin.vgdisplay who volume group(s)
and /usr/sbin/lvs or /usr/sbin/lvdisplay show logical volumes...

---------- Post added at 03:34 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:32 PM ----------

Your stuff should look something like this:

# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg00-root
2064208 493756 1465596 26% /
tmpfs 2028628 0 2028628 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 253871 76334 164430 32% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg00-home
2064208 127568 1831784 7% /home

# pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 vg00 lvm2 a-- 49.72g 2.72g
# vgs
VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree
vg00 1 9 0 wz--n- 49.72g 2.72g
[root@oit-hipaadb2 mejh]# lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Move Log Copy% Convert
home vg00 -wi-ao-- 2.00g
mysql vg00 -wi-ao-- 512.00m
opt vg00 -wi-ao-- 2.00g
root vg00 -wi-ao-- 2.00g
swadm vg00 -wi-ao-- 31.00g
swap vg00 -wi-ao-- 2.00g
tmp vg00 -wi-ao-- 1.50g
usr vg00 -wi-ao-- 4.00g
var vg00 -wi-ao-- 2.00g

[Gareth Jones]

It should be possible to manually partition on install. There is one pitfall I can see, if you're not familiar with UEFI. The booting method is different from BIOS. Instead of loading the MBR as BIOS does, UEFI looks for a EFI Boot Partition, formatted vFAT12/16/32, and reads the boot-loader from a file. Did you create such a partition when installing manually? (Although I don't see such a partition in the installer's set-up either, so I'm not sure what's going on there. I assume sdb is a removable device?)

Using LVM is okay though, as future installs can be told which logical volume to format and which to leave, as if they were partitions. Thus lv_home and lv_root are still separate.

[distributer]

I use GPT partitions with GRUB2, which needs a small extra partition Code EF02. You can create one with 'gdisk', it will also automatically align you partitions to start at 2048 blocks.
So create a new partition 48-2047 with code EF02, then in the installer format it as 'bootcode'

p.s. and in your screenshot you haven't defined any mountpoints for the logical volumes ^^

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by distributer

I use GPT partitions with GRUB2, which needs a small extra partition Code EF02.

That's the BIOS boot partition, which you need to boot Fedora from a GPT system with BIOS. With EUFI, you need a UEFI system partition instead.

[distributer]

Originally Posted by Gareth Jones

That's the BIOS boot partition, which you need to boot Fedora from a GPT system with BIOS. With EUFI, you need a UEFI system partition instead.

Good to know thanks...