[SOLVED] Setting up partitions for installation

[Yora0]

I noticed that the automatic partioning done by Fedora 17 KDE was a bit weird and now I want to set it up manually.

Currently I have partition sda1 with windows and sda5 with misc files, between them 100 GB of free space.
I want Fedora to use those 100 GB, but I have trouble setting up the partitions:
2 GB swap
5 GB boot
93 GB for root

However, I can not put three more partitions on this drive, so I need to use logical drives.
But I dont know how to set that up.
Swap probably needs to be a separate partitions, so root and boot have to share one.
Do I start with root and make boot a logical sub-drive?
Or two logical drives and then combine thm to a logical group?



There are also two device mappers and four unknown Devices labeled /dev/loop which I think are left over from older installations which I did not properly remove but simple had their partitions deleted. Not sure if those complicate things.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by Yora0

However, I can not put three more partitions on this drive, so I need to use logical drives.
But I dont know how to set that up.
Swap probably needs to be a separate partitions, so root and boot have to share one.
Do I start with root and make boot a logical sub-drive?
Or two logical drives and then combine thm to a logical group?

You can probably get away with not separating /boot and /, and just using two primary partitions.

There are also two device mappers and four unknown Devices labeled /dev/loop which I think are left over from older installations which I did not properly remove but simple had their partitions deleted.

Are you using a live CD at the moment? Loop devices are used to access the contents of files as if they were volumes, and the install media make a lot of use of them, but they probably don't relate to anything installed on your hard-disk.

[Yora0]

It was a Live USB Hard Drive.

It wasn't actually that complicated, you just need to have a basic understanding of Logical Volumes.

First you create an LVM Physical Volume, which will be the extended partition.
Then you create an LVM Voulme Group inside the LVM Primary.
Then you start creating LVM Logical Volumes inside the Volume Group, which will be the actual partitions that will have ext4, swap, or any other file systems.

The reason that there are both LVM Physical Volumes and LVM Volume Groups, which appear to do the very same thing, is that you can also spread LVM volumes over several sections of a hard drive or even multiple hard drives.
In my case, I just needed to make one Physical Volume that holds only a single Volume group, but you need to have the volume group and can't put Logical Volumes directly into the Physical Volume, which confused me.

Also, you can't mount /boot to a Logical Volume, so you need to have a Standard Partition for that.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by Yora0

In my case, I just needed to make one Physical Volume that holds only a single Volume group, but you need to have the volume group and can't put Logical Volumes directly into the Physical Volume, which confused me.

A volume group is the association between one or more physical volumes and one or more logical volumes. The physical volumes added to the group are pooled together as a common source of blocks (or extents of blocks), which are then allocated to the logical volumes.