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Manual disk partitioning guide for Linux Mint 9 and Ubuntu 10.04

Install

Ubuntu

Linux Mint

The installation program on Ubuntu 10.04 and Linux Mint 9 are the same. And that’s because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. So if you install one, which involves a simple seven-step process, you can use the same instructions to install the other.

But being simple does not mean that the default partitioning scheme, which creates only two partitions, will satisfy the requirements of the system you wish to create. That’s when a fundamental knowledge of disk partitioning on a Linux system comes in handy, and that’s why, for those without that knowledge, this guide has been written.

The two partitions created by the Mint/Ubuntu installer are: /dev/sda1 for the root file system directory and /dev/sda5, a logical partition for swap. I assume that you are reading this because you want to create separate partitions for the home file system directory (/home), or for /usr, /var, /tmp, etc.

So get your installation disk ready, insert it into your computers optical drive, reboot, and let’s get started. For a generalized guide to dual-booting, see guide to dual-booting.

On Ubuntu, the installer will give you the option to boot into a live CD environment or to bypass the live CD environment and begin installation. On Linux Mint, installation can only be initiated from the live CD environment.

Whether on Mint or Ubuntu, the image below is from the fourth step of the installation process. The first three steps requires nothing more than clicking the “Forward” button, and have been excluded in order to reduce the number of images used in this tutorial. Looking at the image below, you’ll notice that the disk used for the tutorial does not have an operating system on it. The default option is, therefore, to “Erase and use the entire disk.” If the hard drive on your computer is not empty, the installer will inform you that “This computer has [operating system XYZ] on it,” and the default option will be to “Install them side by side, choosing between them at startup.” Whatever the case, you do not want the default. You want to select the “Specify partitions manually (Advanced)” option. So make the selection and click the “Forward” button.

Prepare partitions

Preparing partitions

This image just shows how the window will look with “Specify partitions manually (Advanced)” selected. Forward.

Manual

Manual partitioning

If the hard drive on which you are going to install onto does not have a partition table, click on the “New Partition Table…” to create one. Otherwise, skip to the next image.

New table

Create new partition table

Now we can start creating partitions. For this guide, we’ll be creating partitions for the following:

  • /boot
  • swap
  • /, the main file system directory
  • /home

That’s should be all that’s needed for your laptop or home computer. Select the free space as shown and click the “Add…” button.

Create new

Creating new partitions

The first partition will be for /boot. A size of 100 MB is more than enough for it. That, by the way, is just about the size that virtually all distributions allocate to it. For the file system, that is, for “Use as,” select “Ext4 journaling file system,” then /boot for “Mount point.” Click “OK.”

boot

Creating the boot partition

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Scott
Scott
12 years ago

Thank you so very much, my good man. I was severely frustrated with the internet before you showed me how it was done. Thank you.

Harish
12 years ago

thanks for the manual. I was searching for it a while now and quite pleased to get it all what I was searching for.

Marko Nissinen
Marko Nissinen
12 years ago

Thank you so much for this CLEAR, Essential and what is IMPORTANT, well VISUALIZED Installation-Guide! Best Wishes!

willis Bloggz
willis Bloggz
13 years ago

Thanks for a lucid and useful guide. I would appreciate any insights into how to partition the drive to enable a dual boot system with Windows Xp and Ubuntu 10.x that enables both the windows and Linux O’S to share a common data repository. This makes backing up data simpler and also enables data and files to be used by either OS. If possible I would prefer the common data partition to be as large as possible.

David
David
Reply to  finid
13 years ago

No, it is not usually required that Windows be reinstalled–although it’s a good idea to back it up first as well as to have it freshly defragmented to reduce the likelihood of failure. Most distros can reliably repartition the drive without disturbing the installed Windows setup.
As for a shared data drive, certainly NTFS is the simplest route. There are also utilities around that can make XP able to read at least some Linux disk formats…I have used these in the past.
On my current system, I have Windows 7 Home Premium dual booting with Kutuntu–although I usually only start up the Windows instance to make sure all the software is updated, about once and sometimes twice per month. I still get questions about Windows issues from friends, relatives, and former clients so I want a Windows system to refer to at those times or otherwise I would not bother.
My Linux install isn’t very involved–a small about of space for root with a much larger one for /home, plus a sizable data partition (and a spare one for the root of a second version of Linux I can use to try different distros from time to time). It’s a 500 GB disk, and I have another one in an external case that can easily be swapped for this one in case of a drive failure, and to use as an external backup device. (I learned the utility of that approach with my prior laptop, an HP that was on its fourth hard disk in four years.)

David
David
13 years ago

I just looked at this again–the tutorial was generally good–although since Linux recognizes up to four primary partitions, there is no reason to make any of them logical in this case.
As for swap space–if you will be doing hibernation or “suspend to RAM” you’ll need enough free swap to hold the entire RAM image…so at least as much swap as RAM in that case.

David
David
Reply to  David
13 years ago

I have Kubuntu 10.10 installed from a live CD–and it saw the Windows install with no problem whatsoever. I have no idea why yours did not see it,a and have never heard of that with a healthy disk.

ken
ken
13 years ago

Thanks very much for the tutorial. Perfect!

Phrostbyte
13 years ago

2112 MB swap at the front or back of the drive
9999 MB / next to the swap
REST MB /home

chris
chris
13 years ago

Ok thanks- Got it going as suggested with
Swap 1G, /boot 70Mb, /root the remainder.
Very slow. Unusable. I am trying with Puppy again.. They should revise the minimum resourses
required for Mint 9.
I will use this excellent Mint OS on some other computers for sure. I suggest that for us WinDuhs
users you add simple tutorial here explaining root, boot, swap, home etc. and suggesting allocations to each as a percentage of total available volume.

Really appreciate all your help here.

Chris.
ps. Why are the posts here not showing in correct sequence ?

David
David
Reply to  chris
13 years ago

Chris,

One GB of swap on a 4.3 GB drive and on a system with only 256 MB of RAM is excessive. Since you’re going to reload anyway, try it with 0.5 GB of swap, 40 MB of /boot, the rest as /.

You have discovered why I suggested originally that the “minimum requirements” for a large distro would be unusable.

If you paid $22 for a 4.2 GB drive, you basically paid too much. It is already old enough that it is unlikely to be reliable, but it should be fine to start.

For Word attachments, try AbiWord–it takes far fewer resources than OpenOffice.org. Unless the lady is unusual, she won’t have much real call for PowerPoint attachments–so I’d skip them unless you develop a show-stopper.

Puppy 5, as I said previously, would be one good choice. Another might be Lubuntu, although I looked at it briefly and it didn’t want to install, and I ran out of time to mess with it. Perhaps the copy I downloaded had a glitch–I didn’t follow it up long enough to determine that as yet.

David

David
David
Reply to  David
13 years ago

@finid–

With those limited resources, I’d be leery of running too many open windows anyway. Besides, the elderly lady this system is for is not so likely to be running many things simultaneously to begin with. I’d also look at Opera or Chromium with minimal (if any) plugins to maximize available RAM.

The problem with swap, with such a small and probably very slow hard disk, is that it is extremely slow.

At the same time, it is highly likely that some additional applications may be helpful–and obviously they must go somewhere.

What I still don’t understand is why the 4.3 GB drive to begin with. Newegg, for instance, is offering an 80 GB IDE drive for $22.99, and there are 160s for about $40 or so. A new drive would have been so much more capable–and probably with far more life left in it than this one.

Still, given the limitations and the user it is being done for, I still would opt for maximizing disk space and not worrying so much for multiple browser windows.

David

chris
chris
Reply to  David
13 years ago

” Newegg, for instance, is offering an 80 GB IDE drive for $22.99, and there are 160s for about $40 or so ”
Is that 2.5-laptop ?
Never thought of looking at Newegg – I assumed laptop IDE’s had been discontinued because they were so expensive on ebay. 80G’s are $60 or so.
Puppy looks very attractive and friendly. She will like it. I can always give her a bigger drive if she gets ambitious. I’ll save Mint for myself and others.
Cheers

chris
chris
Reply to  chris
13 years ago

@David
a quick ps: Cheapest ide/ pata laptop drive on newegg is $50 plus shipping- the prices you saw must have been be desktop 3.5.
Hence the 3.5G drive for $10 !
cheers

Chris
Chris
13 years ago

Follow up /edit:

I entered:

/boot 98 MB
Swap 499 MB – (guessing that Ram is 256)
/ (root) the balance – 3725 MB
/home – did not allocate anything.

Hangs at next screen ‘who are you’ ie freezes

Thanks !

chris
chris
Reply to  finid
13 years ago

Thanks- laptop is probably 1.5 cpu with 256 Mb ram. HD was 160 GB ,burnt out. Trying to get it going for the owners mother who wants email/yahoo/wordpad/printer.Shes 68 and never used a computer ! Ability to open email with .doc or .ppt etc attachments would be a luxury. Used IDE drives are expensive and I am doing this as a gift,hence the $22, 4.3G drive.

Smaller distro ? DSL is ugly & unfriendly. Puppy
is beyond my abilities to load on HD, don’t want a
live distro for her. I didn’t like Slax.

This is Mint 9 lxde. After posting last night I entered:
root 3.7, home 500 Mb, swap 125 Mb and it still won’t proceed.Had done a md5sumcheck on the CD,and prewiped the HD with D BAN. What could be wrong? Is it because the drive is so small that it won’t load ? Maybe the ‘minimum requirements’ should be changed ?
Thanks to all .

David
David
Reply to  Chris
13 years ago

@Chris–there are several possibilities. First, a system with a 4.3 GB hard disk is itself probably fairly ancient–it may not be properly supported by many current distros. Also, I’d use one of the very light-weight versions…you are bound for problems with a modern Gnome or KDE release, I believe. I’d probably go with Puppy Linux 5.0. For /boot, I’d give it no more than 40 MB; swap to be twice the size of your actual RAM (check the BIOS to determine that most easily), the rest to root.

David
David
Reply to  David
13 years ago

@finid: They may be minimum specs, but it would definitely not be a very happy minimum. Plus, the rest of the system is likely quite old as well–so there will likely be limits in CPU and graphics performance–plus the disk is obviously old and of low spec. In systems that old, too, there are often very subtle problems–perhaps a very slightly flaky power supply, to give just one example. On my primary system, I am currently running Kubuntu with the Englightenment window manager. However, it’s a four year old laptop that is getting a little flaky, so I have it dual booting and will be putting Puppy on the second partition today in fact, simply to stress it less. (It will be replaced this Summer, actually). That said, this is a laptop with 1.5 GB RAM, presently a 160 GB hard disk, and a dual core processor. For his system, if it only has a 4.3 GB hard disk, it is likely also a very old processor and may have other limitations as well. Thus, I would not go with a large distro for that system.

Chris
Chris
13 years ago

What partitions do I have to make with a
4.3 GB hard drive? I tried 3 times to use the automatic ‘erase and use the entire disk’ but it just hangs.Please tell me what to enter in the manual section. ON MY KNEES ! do not give me any ” you could do A , but on the other hand you could do B,and some people do C…”

Thanks lots!

David
David
13 years ago

As others have said, if you are to use hibernate the swap size must exceed the RAM amount. However, with multi-GB RAM setups, the old advice to use twice the amount of RAM for swap is itself outmoded. For a system with three or four GB of RAM, I see no reason to have more swap than the amount of RAM, as it is otherwise rarely used on systems with that much RAM.
Also, for multiple partitions, EXT4 may not be the best file system for all partitions other than swap, as various filesystems perform quite differently with different file sizes and read/write activity.
Somewhere, I read an article about using the most appropriate filesystem types for each partition for maximum performance. I’ll look and if I find it I’ll post it back here.

SilverWave
13 years ago

If you are going to use Hibernate you need swap to be bigger than your installed memory.

Hmm 100MB /boot never needed that…

tinnitus
tinnitus
13 years ago

Sure 1gb in a 4gb Desktop should be lots, many distros will allow (but alert you)an install without a swap, others run great with 256mb swap or more. Drive space is cheap and I’ve seen the other side of insufficient swap space a system crash, hibernation usage is a different story. I assume today Linux on modern hardware will need little swap space. Linux Kernel now has swapiness for swap management. Many use between 512mb and 2gb for a swap size. I have my system at 4gb in a 6gb DDR3 memory, Arch Linux 64 bit system, yes too large. The only down size to swap is disk space.

tinnitus
tinnitus
13 years ago

A separate /boot partition is easier to recover in case of system failure, sometimes LVM have problems not having /boot alone. RAID Level 0 will not boot of a entire / system, some distros have problems booting of a RAID Level 1 with an entire / and or /boot, it also allows one to create a smaller boot partition for a floppy or USB stick there are other reasons to. Having a separate /home, /usr, /tmp and /var, is a good idea but sometimes it is not recommended for the new Linux user.

tinnitus
tinnitus
Reply to  finid
13 years ago

Yeah 100mb should be enough. I think I saw a distro in auto partition LVM mode set /boot at 100mb, not sure which one. Thinking Debian Lenny. Is it a standard scheme /boot and the rest LVM as opposed to /boot, swap, /?gb LVM and the rest LVM /home. Your layout makes more sense to me. If one is concerned about /home date and no backup, you can always pull /home off and pop it elsewhere.

tinnitus
tinnitus
Reply to  finid
13 years ago

@finid, 500mb /boot they must be thinking about landing space for a 767 jet. Fedora 13 I’ve read is is amazing. I may try it on another rig.

randiroo76073
randiroo76073
13 years ago

Why would you want to make a boot partition? I just use /(root) & /home & swap, in that order. If you are running 4gb of ram or more there is no need to make the swap bigger than 1gb.

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