Partitioning options when installing Mint. Suggested settings?

[Minto2019]

I assume that the setup process will ask me how I want to partition my drive, whether I want to use logical partitioning and whether I want to use encryption for the drive.

Just wondering how I should do all those things.

I'll be installing Mint on a dedicate drive, which has 953GB of total space. I.e. I won't be sharing that drive with any other OS.

It's been a while since I tried installing a Linux. They usually want you to dedicate a certain amount of space to things like the Home partition etc. There's a few different partitions, which I don't remember now.

I want to make it easy to not lose my data when it comes time to upgrade to the next LTS version of Mint. I'll have video games on my drive. Possibly a lot.

So, given that, how would you recommend I divvy up the drive when it comes to the installation process? Thoughts on logical partitions? Recommendations as to what to choose and how much space to give for each partition?

I've got 16GB of RAM.

Does encrypting the drive cause any issues?

Any other things to look out for during setup? Is Timeshift easy to setup?

Thanks

[WharfRat]

About the only thing I can recommend is a separate /home which will make it easier to upgrade or reinstall.

24G should be fine for the root partition and the rest for swap and /home.

If you want logical partitioning then you will have to set them up manually as the default LVM install uses the entire HDD and sets up root and swap only.

Encrypting introduces an extra level of complexity especially when attempting to recover files.

Good luck

[Minto2019]

About the only thing I can recommend is a separate /home which will make it easier to upgrade or reinstall.

24G should be fine for the root partition and the rest for swap and /home.

If you want logical partitioning then you will have to set them up manually as the default LVM install uses the entire HDD and sets up root and swap only.

Encrypting introduces an extra level of complexity especially when attempting to recover files.

Good luck

Thanks for that. For some reason I didn't get Notifications about your reply.

I might have a go at installing Mint on the weekend.

Any thoughts on logical partitioning vs the alternative? Would you recommend one or the other?

If I don't go the logical partitioning route, any thoughts on how much space to allocate to Home, Swap, Root or whatever other options there are? As I say, I'm thinking of downloading games and would want to make sure I preserve them for any LTS upgrade. You'd put games in Home, I'm guessing?

Lastly, re encryption, there would be closed threads here which solve the problem of how to recover files? I'm pretty sure I'll end up asking about that some time,

[WharfRat]

As far as swap size goes recommendations differ so it's difficult to give a straightforward answer.

The table on this page will assist you in figuring out the size. https://itsfoss.com/swap-size/

I was told that version 19 creates a swap file instead of a swap partition so whatever size you decide on for the swap add that to the / partition size.

As I said in my prior post 24G + the swap file size shoud be fine for root. The remaining for home.

If you're going to partition manually then you would be able to setup a swap partition.

If you're new to linux then I wouldn't recommend diving into LVM, however it's your choice.

As I said before the default LVM setup does not give you the ability to manually partition it so you would have to setup the physical volume(s), the volume group and logical partition from the live media first then run the installer.

[Minto2019]

Some years back I made some notes on how to manually partition for LMDE and I had planned on using those notes for the latest MInt (not LMDE). However, either Mint now uses a different installer or it never had the same installer as regular Mint. Any resources for manually partitioning on Mint, because I bailed out on a manual partition because I wasn't sure how to partition manually, as "dev/sda", "dev/sda1" and "sda5" aren't obviously "root", "swap" or "home". Any ideas on how to allocate the usual number of partitions with the naming above? I.e. which kind of partition goes with the names provided when you are installing Mint?

[WharfRat]

Any ideas on how to allocate the usual number of partitions with the naming above? I.e. which kind of partition goes with the names provided when you are installing Mint?

I'm really not understanding the question

If you google you'll find a lot of sites like this that explain how to do it.

I don't think that the partitioning procedure can be all that different between LMDE and Mint.

I you don't like using the installer's interface you can setup the partitions with gparted then assign the mountpoints during installation.

Beyond this I don't know what else I can tell you.

[cliffcoggin]

Why not take the easy route and let Linux Mint do all the partitioning and installation automatically.

Yes, Timeshift is easy to set up. (It must be if I can do it.) The default schedule of how many snapshots to keep may be considered excessive by some, but you can alter it to suit your requirements and disc space.

[BG405]

Sorry for another belated response; there'll be a few as I've been otherwise occupied.

My suggestion (following my usual partitioning scheme & modified to suit your intended usage) is as follows, using GParted to set up the partitions:

• If this is a UEFI install, a 128MB partition labelled EFI; FAT32
• For Root (/) ~25GB is usually sufficient, unless you are planning on installing a lot of software (which from your OP it seems so, in which case 50GB should be more than sufficient); ext4
• At the end of the drive space, I'd suggest 18GB in case you need to use Hibernate, as this will allow for overheads too (system state, etc.; someone please correct me if I'm wrong on this!), if you use a lot of the RAM .. it can be changed later if needed; Linux Swap
• Between / and swap, either create a /home partition occupying the entire remaining space OR a 25GB /home followed by /data filling the remainder (I'd probably go for the former to make things easier); ext4

Apply changes, close GParted. Then, when you open the installer, select "Something Else":

• If a UEFI install, you'd set the 128MB partition as "EFI System Partition"
• Set the mountpoint for / accordingly; make sure it's set as ext4 and set the checkbox to "Format"
• Same for /home (and if you choose to create one, for /data too). First install, check "Format"; for reinstalls leave the box(es) unchecked to preserve your data
• Set the swap partition you created as swap; check "Format" for this too

For UEFI, the bootloader should be set to the EFI partition (/dev/sda1, usually); for legacy it's dev/sda assuming yours is shown as sda, which again it usually is on a single-drive system.

Note you might need to change ownership of /data to yourself; it gets allocated to the root (administrator) account by default (might not be the case with current Mint versions). Also note, AFAIK, it's not shown as an option in the drop-down selection so you'd have to manually type e.g. "/mnt/data" in the Mountpoint box, omitting the quotes. I just use "/data" (also use uppercase on mine, which is entirely up to you).

You can check whether you have booted in UEFI or Legacy (BIOS) with this Terminal command:

Code: Select all

[ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo UEFI || echo BIOS

It would also be helpful to post the output of command inxi -Fxz; paste in reply then highlight the pasted text & press the [</>] button above the reply window.

Hope this helps .. and hope I've not made a boo-boo anywhere as tend to go through these settings without really thinking about them ..

[Minto2019]

My suggestion (following my usual partitioning scheme & modified to suit your intended usage) is as follows, using GParted to set up the partitions:

I'm replying to your post as a bookmark, as I haven't checked my Notifications for ages. However, seeing as I am still having issues installing Mint (see my latest thread, below), I'll have to leave for some much later time...when I've got an external drive to use, which may prove more successful than my attempts to install on to my SSD drive on my PC...which is a different one to my main SSD, which is what I run Windows 10 on.

viewtopic.php?f=90&t=294016

My second last reply (both dated for today) in that thread pretty much says that that is my proposal to see if I can find a workaround to my failure to install Mint 19.1.