Retrospekt

I need to make a couple partitions, but after booting from the ArchFTP liveCD, I've realized the partitioning program built in to Arch stinks. I know there is a bootable Gparted, and I will use that.

I need to make these partitions:

1. Arch - 18gb
2. Swap - 2gb
3. XP - 30gb
4. Media - 100gb

What file types do I make, what is bootable, and what the heck is a system mountpoint of something?

A thorough explanation would be awesome.

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dangerousHobo

Whats wrong with cfdisk?

Filesystem type:
1. Arch -ext3 (there are others though but I prefer ext3)
2. Swap - swap
3. XP - NTFS
4. Media -fat32 (if you want to share between Linux and Windows a fat32 partition is the easiest way to go)

A System mounting point is the location within the system that you want that partition to be mounted.
EXAMPLE:

Say we have these 4 partitions:
1. 2gb Partition
2. 5gb Partition
3. 10gb Partition
4. 40gb Partition

We'll use the first as the swap. So where you'd select the file system type, you would select Swap(linux swap). Then for the last three we'll format as ext3. We also want to use the three partitions for this install so we'll set each drive to different mount points.
2. mount point at /
3. mount point at /usr
4. mount point at /home
Now each partition will be used by the system. Everything under /home is on partition #4. Everything under /usr is on partition #3, and then every thing else is located on partition #2.
Why set up like this? Say each partition was now a seperate hard drive, and the 4th one (your /home) was full. You could stick in another drive and mount it to your system and now have more space.

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Retrospekt

Thanks for the long response. I'm still a little confused about system mountpoints.

Say for my partitions.

1. Swap - 2gb - Linux swap
2. Arch - 18gb - ext3
3. XP - 30gb - NTFS
4. Media - 100gb - Fat32

So in terms of those, what would the system mountpoints be set at, or am I still not understanding this? I guess my problem is I don't really understand the term "Mount".

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rabidgnome229

In windows everything resides on some partition. C:\ is separate from D:\ is separate from A:\ etc. In linux, everything is a part of a single filesystem that starts at /. You can mount a partition at any point in this fs. Let's say you have 3 partitions. You could mount one at /, one at /media/storage, and one at /media/storage/external. (All arbitrary examples). In this case, everything decedent from /media/storage/external would be located on the third partition. Everything in /media/storage that is not in /media/storage/external is on the second, and everything else is on the first partition.

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BIG BROTHER

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Retrospekt

So the boot drive (18gb ext3 partition) would be just "/"? Then for swap I could just do /swap?

For media I could do /media and for XP /xp?

I might still be misunderstanding.

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rabidgnome229

Yes. You can mount any of them anywhere - just do it some place that makes sense to you. I would suggest mounting the xp partition in /media and mounting the media partition inside of /media rather than as /media itself, since some distros put things there (mounted CD's/DVD's etc).

My take is mounting the Arch partition as /, the swap as /swap, the media as /media/storage (or something similar), and the xp as /media/xp (or something similar)

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BIG BROTHER

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Retrospekt

Ah, alright that makes a lot of sense now that I see it applied to my specific partitions. Thanks a lot!

I just read through ArchWiki a bit and Pacman looks pretty easy to use. This is a surprise for me.

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Retrospekt

One more questoin. Logical vs. Primary partitions.

ArchWiki says Primary is for bootable. So I make the Arch partition Primary, but what about swap and XP? Do I make them primary or logical?

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rabidgnome229

IIRC logical partitions exist to allow more than 4(?) partitions on a disk. The XP partition should probably be primary since you're going to boot from that also, but for storage and swap it doesn't really matter. If 4 is the magic number (I don't really remember) you're fine either way since you can make all partitions primary

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dangerousHobo

I believe 4 is the magic number.

Something to add to the parts about mount points, during the install don't worry about giving a mount point to the windows and media partition. You can have just the XP partition set as bootable. Thats how mine has always been. Then install Grub to the MBR.
After the install you can create mount points to the system for the media drive by adding a line to the file /etc/fstab. If you need help with adding it to that file then just ask. In Arch the common thing to do is add mount points under /media. Just make a new directory in /media and mount to that (for example mine is /media/storage). From /etc/fstab you can control the read and write ability to the drive also. If you decide to add a mount point for the XP drive then I'd suggest making it read only. You can write to it too, but I've heard that that can corrupt some data sometimes. So if you have to share between Linux and Windows its best to have a "share" partition in fat32.
Make sense?

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