Partitioning of installation media

Partitioning of installation media

The partitioning of the drives depends on many factors:

• Selection of the siduction variant
  
• Size of the available drives and RAM
  
• Single-boot or dual-boot with an already installed system (Windows, Linux, MAC)
  
• Sharing of data for the installed systems

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:

Otherwise, we recommend at least 20 GB of disk space when installing to the Btrfs file system and using snapper. 50 GB or more is useful 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
250 GB hard disk

Desktop, Linux only
500 GB hard disk:

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

Desktop PC, Linux allein
500 GB hard disk with Btrfs snapshot and systemd-boot:

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:

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

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:

• For notebooks that are to be hibernated, we recommend a swap partition that is at least one GByte or 25% larger than the RAM.
  
• Current desktop PCs that are not to be hibernated and have enough RAM (16 GByte or more, depending on usage) do not need a swap partition.
  
• For desktop PCs with very limited RAM, the rule of thumb is still that the swap partition should be twice the size of the RAM used.

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 a Windows installation, the partitions intended for this purpose must be formatted with NTFS. Siduction has read and write access to the data. It is the standard file system for Windows.

exFAT
A file system developed by Microsoft and used in many types of storage devices such as SD cards and USB flash drives. The patents for it were released in 2019 and as a result Linux supports exFAT from kernel 5.4. It is also very suitable for partitions that are to be accessed by different operating systems.

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.

• GParted: an easy to use partition editor with a graphical interface
  Gparted is available on all siduction installations and installation media equipped with a graphical user interface. It supports a number of different partition table types. The manual page Partitioning the hard disk with GParted provides more information about the program.

• KDE Partition Manager: a Qt based, easy to use partition editor with a graphical user interface
  The KDE Partition Manager is the standard partition editor for the KDE Destktop and as comprehensive as Gparted.

• gdisk / cgdisk: a console program for partition tables of the type GPT - UEFI
  gdisk is the classic text mode program, while cgdisk has a more user friendly ncurses interface. The manual page Partitioning with gdisk provides more information about the program.

• fdisk / cfdisk: a console program for partition tables of the type msdos - MBR
  Note: fdisk should only be used for old hardware that does not support GPT - UEFI.
  fdisk is the classic text mode program, while cfdisk has a more user-friendly ncurses interface. The manual page Partitioning with cfdisk provides more information about the program.

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:

• Logical Volume Manager LVM partitioning

• partitioning with GPT to support UEFI Partitioning with gdisk