Fedora33 Everything Install, what am I doing wrong?

Ask Fedora
1

I have an nvme drive. I want to install Fedora33 onto the first part. I did not want to provide a 1 gig mvme to Fedora.
I preconfigured the drive as:
boot/efi, flagged boot 500meg fat32 /boot/efi
boot ext4 /boot
and a 100gig btrfs pre-formatted partition.
The rest of the space on the drive has been reserved.

Using Everything anaconda
it refuses to accept the 100gig btrfs partition to be used as /, and it does not allow me to reformat it,
So, how do I install Fedora alongside?

2

Is there a reason you have /boot as a separate partition instead of just in / ? Also I find myself having much more trouble with the simple install than with the “advanced”, where it is much easier to see you actually map everything correctly.

Oh and what exactly does the installer say?

3

I believe nowadays having /boot as separate partition is prefered. Fedora installer does that as well.

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4

Really? Even if it has a separate /efi partition? It is the first I have ever heard of such a thing.
You should have EITHER a separate /boot/efi partition, which is how 90% of distros does it and how you should configure your system if you dual boot with Windows, OR a separate /boot. Not both.

(Of course then you have distros that muck the whole thing up, like Pop! who has a separate /boot/efi BUT puts the kernels in /efi and not in /boot, meaning you need a /boot/efi that is minimum 512 Mb…)

5

You’re right, it should be /boot/efi for dual boots.
Strangely enough when I booted the f33 beta installer (and I dualboot with Windows) the automatic installer suggested /boot and not /boot/efi , that’s why I was misremembering it (I never ended up installing it, upgraded instead).

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6

Or maybe I’m misremembering about that! Nevermind me…

7

Understood - this can be a bit confusing because Custom partitioning isn’t 100% manual. It has some guardrails and sometimes is too much “on the rails”.

  1. See Figure 16 in the install guide. That’s an old screenshot at the moment, but by default on Fedora 33 that partition scheme drop-down menu should say Btrfs. Make sure it’s Btrfs.
  2. You should have an item below the partition scheme drop down, it might say “unknown” click on that to find the partitions you’ve precreated.
  3. Pick them in the following order: EFI System partition, on the right side UI at the top, click in the Mount Point field, enter /boot/efi, click on Update Settings button. Click on the boot partition you created, assign it to /boot mount point, Update settings.
  4. To reuse the Btrfs volume you already have created. Just click + and enter only / mountpoint with no size. Repeat for /home. It’ll use the existing Btrfs file system and create subvolumes for each mountpoint you create.

I don’t think it’s possible to just reformat it. You can reuse it (new subvolume required for / but you can assign an existing “home” subvolume to /home). Or you have to delete every subvolume and snapshot off the volume, which then deletes the volume, and frees up that space for you to create a new Btrfs volume.

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