r/archlinux • u/ConversationFar8073 • 1d ago
DISCUSSION First Manual install what partitioning scheme did you use?
Quite simple question when first doing a manual install of arch did you use cfdisk or fdisk or another?
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u/No-Dentist-1645 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is my current partition setup for my Arch drive:
❯ lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,FSTYPE,FSAVAIL,FSUSE%,MOUNTPOINTS /dev/nvme0n1
NAME SIZE FSTYPE FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1 1.8T
├─nvme0n1p1 16M
├─nvme0n1p2 1.8T btrfs 1.1T 39% /home/USER/.local/share/Steam
│ /home
│ /data
├─nvme0n1p3 1G vfat 349.2M 66% /boot
└─nvme0n1p4 63G ext4 20.4G 62% /
It's a 1.8T drive split into 63GB ext4 root partition, 1G ESP boot partition, and the rest into a btrfs partition with submodules for /home, /data, and my steam drive.
The most important thing to notice is the ext4 filesystem for root and btrfs for everything else. The reason why I don't put my root in the btrfs partition is that my laptop has suffered power failures a few times before (rarely, but they have happened), and when they did happen the btrfs partition suffered unrecoverable corruption (root tree corruption) where snapshots wouldn't have helped. So when this happens, my root filesystem is still okay, and I just have to recover what I can from my /home directory and then repartition it. For this same reason I wouldn't recomment btrfs as a root directory for anyone unless they can be 100% confident that their system will never abruptly shut down from any power failures
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u/torsten_dev 1d ago
GPT, 1GB EFI esp, LVM on LUKS for the rest.
That's the partitioning scheme. What tool you use doesn't matter much, but fdisk has a nice enough CLI, so Inuse that one.
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u/KawaiiMaxine 1d ago edited 1d ago
To answer the question of what partition editor i used, fdisk works fine i used that. To answer the question of what partitioning scheme i used:
/dev/sda - MBR
/dev/sda1 - 500G - ext4 - /
To answer what scheme i currently/typically use
/dev/sda - GPT
/dev/sda1 - 1G - exFAT - /boot
/dev/sda2 - 10G - SWAP - [swap]
/dev/sda3 - 10G - ext4 - unmounted(small 2nd install of arch as a recovery partition)
/dev/sda4 - rest of drive - BTRFS - /
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u/Boring-Equivalent137 1d ago
I prefer cfdisk, I am sure fdisk is quicker but I don't see a reason to learn it
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u/Edelglatze 1d ago
I prefer cfdisk. You have even more choices on the arch ISO: there are fdisk, cfdisk, gdisk and also parted.
On the partitioning scheme: it depends on what you want to achieve. When I first installed Slackware, more than 30 years ago, I put everything in one partition. This proved to be fatal, after a version upgrade something went wrong and I lost everything. So, having home separate is a must for long term usage. In setting up a test system it doesn't matter.
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u/diegotbn 1d ago
Gdisk- then just allocated partitions for boot, swap, and then /. No separate partition for /home
Tbh I probably didn't even need to dedicate swap and should just use a swap file instead but I'm too lazy to change it
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u/LowKeyBrit36 1d ago
I always use fdisk for manual Linux installs.
For a GPT disk on my desktop:
4.0GiB /boot/efi
10GiB swap (encrypted)
100-200GiB / (encrypted) ext4
The rest goes to /home/$USER (encrypted) ext4
For my corebooted laptop:
2.0MiB biosboot
10GiB swap (encrypted)
100GiB / (encrypted) ext4
The rest goes to /home/$USER (encrypted) ext4
Depends on your use case, what you need, and what you don't need. If you do luks2 encryption, you need grub 2.14 on your distro (will have it on arch) and a /boot/efi for gpt disk, or biosboot partition.
If different bootloader, most likely unencrypted /boot, which is slightly less secure.
Wouldn't advise using luks1 tbh.
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u/VendorNeutral 1d ago
Neither cfdisk nor fdisk are partition schemes. What is your actual question?
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u/FocusedWolf 1d ago edited 1d ago
I manjaro live usb gparted (It was a surgical operation to avoid data loss so i didn't want to use the terminal for this). Btw (only an issue if dual booting i think) if you use $ mkfs.ext4 /dev/<partition> on a partition that was NTFS before (e.g. resized an ntfs partition to make room for ext4 partition) then use $ gdisk and change its type from 700 (Microsoft Basic Data) to 8300 (Linux filesystem). Otherwise Windows will see it as an NTFS drive still.
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u/archover 1d ago
I always use fdisk and it's never failed me. I pretty much know the keystrokes from memory. Besides familiarity, it has many features too.
Regardless, the tool should not impact the install.
Welcome to Linux and Arch. Good day.
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u/moverwhomovesthings 1d ago
The partitioning scheme on the arch wiki, but with encrypted root and a swap file instead of a swap partition.
Also I use fdisk, I found cfdisk to be a bit confusing and being forced to manually search for the button to do the thing I want to instead of simply pressing a key on my keayboard is a downgrade imo
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u/doctrgiggles 1d ago
I've never used fdisk and thought "this program needs to be different". It works great and I understand it, so I keep using it.