Get help on partitioning here [Part 3]

[UechyLibre]

[NeddySeagoon]

UechyLibre,

[Ramirez987]

Hi all,

I am new to Gentoo linux.
I am trying to install it on my old laptop Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505(core 2 duo 1.6, 2.5 GB RAM, 128GB disk) and I am stuck at Installation/Disks part.

It seems to me, that I need to use MBR label, because it is old computer, but I am not sure.
So I have created 4 partitions, as Handbook says and there is a sentence: "Mark the partition for UEFI purposes:"
and then: "Using UEFI with MBR partition layout is discouraged. If an UEFI capable system is used, please use GPT layout."

So, should I do it, or not? If not, should I make the partition? Mark it as what? Or maybe I can use GPT label? Can you help me?

[szatox]

Use mbr and don't mark it it for uefi.
They should be marked as linux filesystem, lvm, or raid volume, depending on the way you're going to use them. It's usually a good idea to be sincere with your tools. If you don't specify it, they should default to linux filesystem and you can easily change it later if you want another layer between your files and the hard disk.
AFAIR Gentoo manual has several sections for making your system bootable. Follow either of those that has you install any bootloader. I personally like grub-legacy, though other options are available.

[Sergix8]

Hi, i'm new, i would like to know how i can see the partition table in GENTOO, and also each time i put out the disk of GENTOO it seems it desinstall, so i can only use my W7 partition.

Thanks.

[NeddySeagoon]

Sergix8,

Welcome to Gentoo.

[Sabongayam8]

Good day all... BACK to Gentoo... I did an install some years ago and quite honestly liked it. I have since played around with 'based on Gentoo" installs and found all the problems this forum speaks of.

Basically you did not set it up and even if you're familiar with Gentoo you end up "trying" to undo the setup of someone else to make it work or do what you wish it to do. It is ultimately easier to take the time to just do it yourself and have the setup you want.

So here I am. I had use Calculate for a bit. It always breaks if you try to use it or convert it to Gentoo. The latest version is so LOCKED into their Calculate setup with config files not quite in the usual place that I took one look and realized it would be way more work trying to UNDO their settings than just install.

I jumped over to Sabayon and their current installer is just the weirdest thing I've seen in my life of installing Linux distros. I can not make it choose my preset partitions and it quite seems to wish to do it's own thing. Plus I suspect I'll still have similar issues as Calculate though not as bad.

Somewhere else in the forum when I did a search I came across the suggestion to do your install in stages. A good idea not considered. Because I am a bit pressed for time and my 1st Gentoo Install which broke because I don't understand the config file changes that take place on updates took me 6 hours.

This time I hope to gain a better understanding of that.

My approach is to read the maual and I have, and I am... reading it again. before I start because I really have no time to fix problems.

I am installing on two different units.

Unit 1: Intel NUC6CAYH
Dual core Celerons
HDMI out
VGA out
4 USB ports and I can get the actual specs but it's just off the top of my head.

Obviously newer units. My confusion, sorry if it's clearer to others but these are my 1st EFI units because my previous but still working laptop is so old it's BIOS.

In reading the installation guide...

When I get to the part where we mount /dev/sdx /mnt/gentoo

that's pretty understandable and then we come to the instructions after unpacking the tar

It asks us to mount the "boot" partiton just before or after that when building the kernel

I put this question here under partition questions because my partition setup does not have a specific 'boot' partition.

where should I direct this?

having 2 Binary Distros here 'boot' is typically here in the:
/boot/

Basically I want to keep this arrangement at the moment. The Little Nuc is what I use daily so I don't want to mess around with it too much.

Even with Binary Distros I am a bit pressed for time so I haven't any intention of redoing my partitions at the moment.

The other Device is a NUC6i7KYK but that'll be after I learn on this one and I've found already that all but one project I used on it would not install on the NUC6CAYH.

Anyway, if someone might be able to give me a tip about this "boot" issue I would much appreciate it.

I don't usually start installs etc until I'm sure I've got the answers or problems worked out.

Thanks...

My partition scheme is pretty basic.
sda1 EFIboot fat32
sda2 linux Ext 4
sda3 linux btrfs
sda4 linux (plan to put gentoo here)
sda5
sda6 swap
sda7

I haven't gotten around to installing it but planning to try something called refind as a manager to the installs.

As a last parting note of info, I personally have no need of systemd in my usage and thefrore don't plan on installing it so a basic Gentoo install for a desktop system.

Just wondering what to do about the 'boot' when I do the kernel configuration.

[pensador_13]

Hello

I intend to use only Gentoo on my laptop.

The BIOS of my laptop has two boot modes: UEFI and Legacy.
UEFI has secure boot enabled and I couldn't disable it, it seems that if a computer includes Windows 10, manufacturers can choose to enable Secure Boot and not give users a way to turn it off

Then I switched to Legacy and I was able to boot the USB stick with the minimal Gentoo install.
I read the Preparing the disks section of the AMD64 Handbook, but the following question remain unanswered:
Is it possible to configure the partitioning in a way that will run with UEFI mode and Security Boot enabled?

Thanks in advance,
Luís Carneiro

[chilos]

Hey guys. I'm following the handbook and so far I've created my partitions. But, I can't seem to add a file system to any of them.

I try:

mkfs.vfat /dev/sda2 ( i am uefi)
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4

Then it shows me the list of commands you get when you type 'help'.

and when I hit print, the column for files systems are still blank.

Anybody know what I am not doing right?

[NeddySeagoon]

chilos,

After

[P.Kosunen]

[Garbanzo]

Hi, I'm going to try a Gentoo install for the first time.

I have a brand new system with no OS. It has a 256SSD, a 2TB HD, and 16GB ram.

Any recommendations for partitions? I want to also install KDE Neon so i was thinking of splitting the SSD in two.

Thanks

[nlantau]

Hi!

I'm new here on the forum (excuse me if I'm posting this in the wrong place).
I've been a proud Gentoo user for about a month or so now and I'm right where I belong. What a wonderful distro!

Question: After a successful (read: not done yet) resize of my ext4 filesystem and resize of root partition (as suggested by Hu here https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8500360.html#8500360, would it be possible to create an ext4 filesystem on the unused to be used as an LFS root partition? I'm thinking 'why not?', but I'm asking because I've found it difficult to find answers to my situation.

My setup:

When I did my partitioning and setup of filesystems during the installation, I followed the handbook (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Disks#Partitioning_the_disk_with_GPT_for_UEFI).

[Hu]

[nlantau]

Thank you, Hu!

I tried it first on my spare laptop (running Gentoo as well. It's my "try-new-and/or-edgy-stuff-on"-laptop). Was a bit nervous when the only option in fdisk is to delete the partition and then create a new one. But giving it some reading and understanding the importance of the starting blocks, I gave it a go.

[Hu]

I see now. I got sidetracked with the parenthetical notes and thought you had done some, but not all, of the changes.

Yes, the delete+recreate is an unfortunate limitation of some tools, but as you found, as long as (1) the start position is unchanged across delete+create, and (2) the size of the partition is not less than the size of the filesystem, you will be fine. The partition table defines the start/stop points of the data. Deleting a partition does not, on its own, affect the data contained in that range. However, it can make that range difficult to find again, and if you cannot find where the control structures start, you cannot mount the contained filesystem. Hypothetically, if you had deleted both the p2 and p3 partitions, and did not have notes on the extents of each, it could be difficult to recreate p3 with the right start, since it could start anywhere after where p2 started, and with p2 deleted, you don't know its size anymore. For the simplifying case here, where you only deleted one partition, and there was no gap between the deleted partition and its predecessor, knowing the right start is fairly straightforward.

[nlantau]

I can confirm that my initial thoughts and ideas regarding partitioning and installing LFS works. Had a successful boot of LFS (first try!) last night.

A note on grub2: Since I have a separate partition for /boot, I ran the usual

[Budoka]

Unfortunately, my current attempt at installing Gentoo is not going as smoothly as it has in the past. LOL

Anyway, my question.

I'm trying to partition unallocated disk space to install Gentoo.

When executing fdisk I get the following warning:

[jrittenh]

I have Gentoo installed and working with UEFI. However, there's a quirk of the setup that I'm curious if I can remedy.

I currently have a 256MB VFAT /boot partition with /boot/EFI under it. Previously, I would have made /boot anywhere from 256MB to 1GB depending on what types of and how many kernel rebuilds I planned on doing and keeping around, but it would be EXT2. The nice bit of EXT2 is that it supports symbolic links. This allowed me to leverage the 'make install' bit of the kernel and the automatic 'latest build' symlink creation. That meant I pretty much never needed to change the grub config immediately after a kernel build, as the symlink would point to the new kernel by default. With VFAT, that's not possible.

So here's my "I still don't understand EFI" question: Is there some combination of partitions that would allow me to make EFI happy and also support symlinking the active kernel? Or am I just stuck with losing that function and I should be rerunning grub-mkconfig every time anyway?

[NeddySeagoon]

jrittenh,

It can be achieved. Only the *.efi file loaded by the EFI firmware needs to be on the VFAT partition.
That will be your boot loader.
With two partitions /boot can be whatever the boot loader can read.
and /boot/EFI can be a mount point for the VFAT partition. EFI might be a bad choice of name for the mount point because you will have /boot/EFI/EFI/.... as the EFI firmware will always look in the EFI directory on the VFAT partition.

You need to reinstall grub, remake its grub.cfg and save/restore all your kernels when you divide your existing VFAT into two.
Don't forget /etc/fstab.

Keep you live media handy, in case you don't get it right first time :)
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[sMueggli]

[jrittenh]

That's exactly what I was hoping, but hadn't gotten the courage to try. Thanks! I'll definitely give it a go.

[jrittenh]

[xeroxpangaea]

Hello forum people! I'd appreciate your expertise to help me figure out how to go about configuring some bootloader stuff and do a sanity check of my plan (towards the end of the post). My partition situation is the following:

- /dev/sda6 - ext4 - is the root filesystem partition for another linux installation
- /dev/sda7 - EFI boot partition, mounted at /boot (well, mounted when i use my default linux at sda6). It has 309 MB free out of 524 MB.
- /dev/sda4 - some unused EFI partition that I created while messing with previous installations, has 830 MB free.
- /dev/sda8 - XFS partition i created specifically for the root filesystem for Gentoo.

Now, I'm going through the wiki handbook and it seems like I can omit the step of creating a new EFI partition since I already got one - is this correct? If yes, does it mean I should just keep following the handbook till it explicitly gets to the point where GRUB is configured (here - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Bootloader#Default:_GRUB) and do the following:
- mount /dev/sda7 at /efi
- skip the grub-install part (

[Zucca]

I'd highly recommend that you first run grub-mkconfig without any arguments and inspect the output that grub really identifies both OSes correctly and creates boot options for both.
_________________
..: Zucca :..