I have just installed fedora 36 on my computer, and I have some question regarding partitioning. But before them, some background/information.
My computer has a 1TiB hard drive and a 120 GiB ssd. And I want to alocate all of the storage to fedora. I will be using my computer for a cad course using freecad, for learning programming and maths (mathematica/matlab).
Now to the questions.
1.- I read that the partitions needed are / , /home , /boot , /boot/efi , swap. Is this correct?
2.- Cant quiet get the difference between / and /home. If I install freecad or mathematica, where will they be installed?
3.- In relation to 2, from waht i read it is the norm to alocate more storage to /home than /. But from trying, I cant seem to alocate more storage to /home than what i have alocated to / , e.g. I alocate 500 GiB to / and 500 GiB to /home, but if i change / to 100 GiB then /home will also change to 100 GiB, and I cant change /home to 500 GiB again.
4.- I would like to install programs on the ssd and general files on the hardrive, how would i configure / and /home to do that.
5.- Would this configuration be okay? 1 GiB of standar partition of ssd in /boot , 1 GiB of standar partition of ssd boot/efi and 1 GiB of standar partition of ssd swap.
Sorry if it is a loaded post, I am little overwhelmed with this, but no regrets.
Welcome to
If you don’t know much and new to fedora or linux then it is easy just select in storage configuration automatic partition it will do all for you just select your 120GB ssd in anaconda in storage destination that is all you have to think about. And you can use the hdd for raw storage just format that drive with ext4 or btrfs or xfs what ever you like with 1 or 2 partition as per your preference.
The automatic partition sets /boot on the hdd while I would like for it to be in the ssd. As for setting the hdd with 1 or 2 partitions, what do you mean by that, as far as I can tell the re are no options for that in automatic.
I think you should do as @frankjunior has suggested. Install fedora on ssd and then use Gnome disk after installation to format the hdd to use it for personal stuff. If you want to set the hdd for /home then select the disk and choose belivet gui don’t worry its not hard you will be able to set whatever partitions you want. If you don’t understand something feel free to ask.
When using custom and automatic mount points it creates the following (sorry for typing it but I cant screenshot it and my phone has a potato camara)
Data /home Mount Point:/home----Devices:hdd and ssd
-----------Device type: Btrfs Volume: fedora_localhost-live
System / Mount Point:/----Devices:hdd and ssd
----------Device type: Btrfs Volume: fedora_localhost-live
/boot/efi Mount Point:/boot/efi----Devices:hdd and ssd
-----------Device type: standar partition
/boot Mount Point:/boot----Devices:hdd and ssd
-----------Device type: standar partition
Here the os is booting from where? From what i can see /boot is in both the ssd and hdd.
And after the installation, I go to files and see home as the combined capacity of the hdd and ssd.
And I cant only select the ssd, when i try it post
“You selected disk sdb (ssd), which contains devices that also use unselected disk sda (hdd). You must select or de-select this disk as a set”
Shoul I /home as a Btrfs or ext4? And from what i have read, /home is where thigs like screenshots, libreoffice documents or a drawing from freecad go to, and / is where the software themselves are, like libreoffice, freecad, etc?
Yes you are right you can use ext4 anf like me what i do large download files and stuff that i use often i move them to my other partition you can also do that. Having all in ssd will give a extra bit snappy ness
In my opinion you should use ext4 as you are a beginner and you might find btrfs confusing. Ext4 is reliable so don’t worry about it. You are right /home is where you store your personal files and /
is for the system.
ext4 effectively is the best solution, Preserving a ( big ) partition for datas will allow you to re-install Fedora without dammage :
You just need to copy & paste your personnal datas ( Folders : Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, … ) on this extra partition Data Disk before new installation…
You can also put all sensitives documents on Data Disk
Perso, I’m using :
EFI-Partition 0.8Go for /boot/efi
ext4 Partition 0.8Go for /boot
ext4* Partition for / ( root with Home inside for a cool size sharing beetwen home & root )
swap* of 32Go for swap ( physical because used for hibernation, 32 Go because my PC has 16Go RAM )
ext4* Data Disk extra Partition ( here 600Go ) for Safe Data ( Never broken even during Fedora (re) installation )
*Encrypted is better for safety
( Using gparteddnf -y install gpartedbefore the installation is very useful. Don’t forget to name and to label each partition, then you will be able to select them easily during the installation procedure. )
Surely ext4 3 are good but my recommendation is btrfs as it have some nice features which makes it somewhat close to openzfs cow zstd and other features if new to linux this will help and you don’t need to do anything.
110Go may be small if you decide to install Labs and son on ( dnf grouplist -v shows you some of the big possibilities of Fedora, and if you decide to install all the games from Fedora offers for instance it wil take ~40Go )
Data Disk should be encrypted for max safety : you can use disks ( gnome-disk-utility.X86-64 ) to cReate encrypted partitions.
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