Hard drive partitions [SOLVED]

[Dar-es-Salaam]

Hi

I have recently screwed up my hard drive and am trying to reinstall LMDE. my problem is that it keeps asking for me to make partitions and give them /, /boot etc and ext2, 3 or 4 and do i need a linux swap and what ext does it use
how many partitions do i need.

any help please

Cheers

[sumski]

you need only one , for / mount point, but it wold be good if you make one swap partition , and a /home partition, but they are not neccessery

[cwsnyder]

If LMDE is going to be the only operating system installed on the drive, you can normally go with the installation defaults.

That said, what LMDE's default behaviour is to set up 2 partitions: / which is bootable, containing the file system which you are used to seeing, either ext3 or ext4, and a swap partition which is normally about twice the size of your physical memory to allow your computer to go into 'sleep' mode and to allow you to run more programs than will fit in your physical memory.

This is the way I understand the ext$ family of hard disk formats. Ext2 is the oldest Linux hard disk format still in general use, and is used mainly for thumb drives and SSDs at present. Ext2 does not have a journal written to the drive and is unable to recover from a power interruption during the middle of a write to the drive. You might have to reformat the entire drive if it is formatted ext2 and your power to the drive was interrupted in the middle of a write cycle, causing data corruption. Ext3 is basically ext2, but adds a journal to attempt to prevent the type of data corruption outlined in the previous sentences. Ext4 is a journaled ext3 type system, but adds optimization to make data access faster.

Ext3 is still the default file system for most Linux distributions, at present, although other proponents are pushing ZFS, BTRFS, and more layouts for the file system on the hard drive, many of which have drivers included in the Linux kernel.

[sumski]

swap partition is useful if you run out of free ram , so your OS doesn't freeze. it uses its own filesystem ,not ext3/ext4

for other mount points ext4 is default , but you can put ext2/ext3 if you want

[lauren]

Hi Dar-es-Salaam!
To give optimal help we need to know more details:
1. You have Windows?
2. You could install Linux on only one partition, but that's no good idea. The minimum are: "/" and "/home" and maybe "swap" and a "DATA" partition.
lauren

[sgosnell]

One more opinion. Use ext4, it's faster and more reliable than ext3. Don't worry about the swap partition, it will be handled by the installer, just accept whatever it gives you. If you want a separate /home partition, you need to use gparted to make the partitions before you start the installation. From the liveCD boot, run gparted, partition your HDD into two partitions, whatever size you think you need (I tend to make them more or less the same size, but it's not essential, just make sure you have enough for /, 10GB or more is better in the long run), then run the installer, and select the proper partition for / and for /home. It's probably better to use sda1 or /, and sda2 for /home. The installer will resize the /home partition to put the swap partition at the end, perhaps into an extended partition. You can make more partitions if you want, but I've never seen the need. Keep in mind that you can have only 4 primary partitions, so if you want to use more than what I've recommended, make one an extended partition, so you can add logical partitions to it.

[gjringo]

One more opinion. Use ext4, it's faster and more reliable than ext3. Don't worry about the swap partition, it will be handled by the installer, just accept whatever it gives you. If you want a separate /home partition, you need to use gparted to make the partitions before you start the installation. From the liveCD boot, run gparted, partition your HDD into two partitions, whatever size you think you need (I tend to make them more or less the same size, but it's not essential, just make sure you have enough for /, 10GB or more is better in the long run), then run the installer, and select the proper partition for / and for /home. It's probably better to use sda1 or /, and sda2 for /home. The installer will resize the /home partition to put the swap partition at the end, perhaps into an extended partition. You can make more partitions if you want, but I've never seen the need. Keep in mind that you can have only 4 primary partitions, so if you want to use more than what I've recommended, make one an extended partition, so you can add logical partitions to it.

Agreeing with the above, another option is to use the 4 available primary partitions to run 4 different Operating Systems without a Swap partition (a swap partition is counted as a primary) as I do.It is possible to run a Linux system without a swap space, and the system will run well if you have a large amount of memory. I have 4GB of RAM (LMDE counts it as 3 with the 32Bit kernel) and have not run into problems.

[Dar-es-Salaam]

Hi one and all,
thank you all for your help. I am only going to run LMDE on the drive I was on about, I have decided to go with the one partition scenario and hope for the best, I think that I tried it before and it seemed to get stuck on something called /target but i will give it another go.
cheers for now, I will keep you all posted on my success or lack of it.
Cheers

Gordon

[sumski]

I have 4GB of RAM (LMDE counts it as 3 with the 32Bit kernel) and have not run into problems.

Did you try to install "bigmem" krenel ? It should recognize 4GB + RAM on a 32 bit system

[kx32]

I have just installed LMDE on a new solid state drive. Had problems using ext 4 as it wouldn't work installed it on ext3 and it installed no problem.

[Dar-es-Salaam]

Hi one and all

Success at last. thanks to you lot I went with one partition and ext4 and this time it worked. what the difference was this time I have no idea, still all's well that ends well.

Once again Thanks a lot

Cheers

Gordon

[sgosnell]

If you try to use a username that is anything but lowercase alpha characters, the install will hang and not succeed. No uppercase, no special characters other than a through z are allowed. It's not clearly explained, but that's the way it is. Other problems can cause hung installs, of course, but that seems to be one of the more common ones.