Partitioning of installation media

Partitioning of installation media

The partitioning of the drives depends on many factors:

For Linux beginners, we recommend that you create only two partitions
/root (incl. /home ) and swap, as this makes a first installation much easier. After the installation, additional data partitions can be created, or a separate /home if desired.
However, we rather advise against creating a /home partition. The /home directory should be the place where the individual configurations are stored, and only these. For all other private data, a separate data partition should be created. The advantages for data stability, data backup and also in case of data recovery are almost immeasurable.
Purchasing an external USB hard drive for regular data backup is also worth considering.

Minimum requirements

The minimum requirements for the reasonable use of a siduction installation are:

installed system hard disk space
siduction NoX 5GB
siduction Xorg 10GB
siduction LXQt 15GB
siduction LXDE 15GB
siduction Xfce 15GB
siduction Cinnamon 15GB
siduction KDE Plasma 15GB

Otherwise, we recommend at least 20 GB of disk space when installing to the Btrfs file system and using snapper.
50 GB is reasonable if you want to use siduction on Btrfs for a longer period of time and many snapshots are kept.

Examples with different disk sizes

There are several good ways to divide your plates. These examples should give a first insight. They refer to partition tables of the type “GPT”. The first partition on the first disk is mandatory for the boot process.

Laptop with 8 GB RAM, Linux only
120 GB hard disk

Partition Size File system Use
1 100 MB FAT32 EFI-System (ESP)
2 25 GB ext4 /
3 85 GB ext4 data
4 10 GB Linux Swap Linux Swap

Desktop, Linux only
500 GB hard disk:

Partition Size File system Use
1 100 KB FAT16 EFI system (ESP)
2 30 GB ext4 /
3 466 GB ext4 data
4 4 GB Linux Swap Linux swap

Desktop, Linux only
500 GB hard disk with Btrfs snapshot:

Partition Size File system Use
1 100 KB FAT16 EFI system (ESP)
2 496 GB btrfs /
3 4 GB Linux Swap Linux swap

Desktop, Linux only
160 GB hard disk

Partition Size File system Use
1 100 KB FAT16 EFI system (ESP)
2 26 GB ext4 /
3 130 GB ext4 data
4 4 GB Linux Swap Linux swap

If a dual boot with MS Windows™ is created, MS Windows must always be installed as the first system onto the hard disk. The first four partitions of our examples should be located directly after each other at the beginning of the hard disk. After that, the partitions for Linux and shared data follow.

See also Microsoft: UEFI/GPT partitioning, Windows 11.

Desktop, dual-boot (MS Windows and Linux)
1 TB hard disk:

Partition Size File system Use
1 100 MB FAT32 EFI-system (ESP)
2 16 MB without Windows MSR
3 50 GB NTFS Windows system
4 1 GB NTFS Windows RE
5 415 GB NTFS data for Windows and Linux
6 30 GB ext4 / (Linux root)
7 500 GB ext4 data for Linux
8 4 GB Linux Swap Linux Swap

Desktop, dual-boot (MS Windows and Linux)
120 GB hard disk:

Partition Size File system Use
1 100 KB FAT16 EFI system (ESP)
2 16 MB without Windows MSR
3 40 GB NTFS Windows system
4 1 GB NTFS Windows RE
5 47 GB NTFS data for Windows and Linux
6 30 GB ext4 / (Linux root)
7 2 GB Linux swap Linux swap

Laptop with 32 GB RAM, dual boot (MS Windows and Linux)
1 TB hard disk:

Partition Size File system Use
1 100 KB FAT16 EFI system (ESP)
2 16 MB without Windows MSR
3 50 GB NTFS Windows system
4 1 GB NTFS Windows RE
5 499 GB NTFS data for Windows and Linux
6 30 GB ext4 / (Linux root)
7 380 GB ext4 data for Linux
8 40 GB Linux swap Linux swap

File systems of the partitions

The type “GPT” should be selected as the partition table. In this way the advantages over “MBR” can be used. Only with old hardware “MBR” is still meaningful. The explanations for this can be found on our manual page Partitioning with gdisk.

Linux Swap
A swap partition corresponds in functionality to the swap file in Windows, but is far more effective than it. Its size depends on the installed system and the user’s requirements. Some examples:

ext4
The ext4 file system is the default file system on siduction. This applies to all partitions when only Linux operating systems are used.

Btrfs
Btrfs can be used instead of ext4. Together with the program Snapper it offers the possibility to create snapshots of the file system which are selectable in the boot manager Grub afterwards. You need a sufficiently large hard disk. See also System administration Btrfs.

NTFS
For data exchange with a Windows installation the designated partition should be formatted with NTFS. Siduction can access the data read and write. For Windows it is the standard file system.

HFS+
For a dual-boot installation with Macintosh, a separate data partition with the HFS or HFS+ file system is useful. Linux and MAC can access it read and write.

Partition editors

Caution
When using any partitioning software, there is a risk of data loss. Always back up important data to another disk in advance.

Mounted partitions (also swap) must be detached before editing.
You can do this by entering to following command as root:

# umount /dev/sda1

To mount a swap partition, use this command:

# swapoff -a

Further information

Here the comprehensive english documentation of GParted

Microsoft: UEFI/GPT partitioning, Windows 11

For more partitioning options see:

Last edited: 2023-05-18