Arch Linux

Mudpie

Member

Registered: 2022-09-01

Posts: 9

Need help partitioning new dual-boot install

Following the guide, at this point https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Instal … _the_disks I'm stuck. Being new, it's not exactly clear what I should do.

See pic here https://i.imgur.com/5hpluSQ.jpg for my existing partitions. I have an existing linux distro installed, and I want to make a space (256gb) for Arch, and also do any kind of mounting and anything else that's necessary so I can move to the next section (the actual installation, it seems).

I hesitate to say what due diligence I've taken to understand and solve this before bothering you guys because it may be "unsupported", so I'll just say that I'm stuck now and I would appreciate some help.

Thank you guys!

Last edited by Mudpie (2022-09-01 16:11:02)

Daerandin

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2013-05-07

Posts: 280

Website

Re: Need help partitioning new dual-boot install

Following the guide, at this point https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Instal … _the_disks I'm stuck. Being new, it's not exactly clear what I should do.

What you should do now is decide how you want your partition layout, this is a decision no one can do for you. If you don't know how to use the tools available, then read the documentation. The install iso for Arch comes with several non-gui tools that can all be used.

See pic here https://i.imgur.com/5hpluSQ.jpg for my existing partitions. I have an existing linux distro installed, and I want to make a space (256gb) for Arch, and also do any kind of mounting and anything else that's necessary so I can move to the next section (the actual installation, it seems).

For the future, you should post the actual text instead of pictures of text. That makes it easier for anyone trying to help.

I hesitate to say what due diligence I've taken to understand and solve this before bothering you guys because it may be "unsupported", so I'll just say that I'm stuck now and I would appreciate some help.

Please don't withhold information about your own troubleshooting.

There is a big lack of information in your post about your setup. An little explanation about your existing partition layout would be helpful.

I can give you a few pointers regarding what I assume you are struggling with. Since you don't appear to have any available partitions (I am just assuming that the 1.8 T partition is used by the other distro you have installed) that means you will need to shrink an existing partition so you have space to create a new. Resizing partitions is potentially dangerous to your data so make sure you have a backup. Personally I have no experience with resizing partitions.

There are some other cases where you would not need to resize. If your filesystem is btrfs then you can avoid the resizing. You could simply create a new btrfs subvolume and use that for Arch. If on the other hand you are using LVM, you can easily and safely shrink the existing logical partition and create a new logical partition in the LVM container. I might be missing other options here with other special types of filesystems, but this is the kind of information you should provide so it is easier to give you help.

Since I am seeing an EFI partition, I assume your boot method is UEFI. In that case, you generally want to share EFI partition and bootloader between distros, or you could chain bootloaders.

Please read in full https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_guidelines

Mudpie

Member

Registered: 2022-09-01

Posts: 9

Re: Need help partitioning new dual-boot install

Following the guide, at this point https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Instal … _the_disks I'm stuck. Being new, it's not exactly clear what I should do.

What you should do now is decide how you want your partition layout, this is a decision no one can do for you. If you don't know how to use the tools available, then read the documentation. The install iso for Arch comes with several non-gui tools that can all be used.

See pic here https://i.imgur.com/5hpluSQ.jpg for my existing partitions. I have an existing linux distro installed, and I want to make a space (256gb) for Arch, and also do any kind of mounting and anything else that's necessary so I can move to the next section (the actual installation, it seems).

For the future, you should post the actual text instead of pictures of text. That makes it easier for anyone trying to help.

I hesitate to say what due diligence I've taken to understand and solve this before bothering you guys because it may be "unsupported", so I'll just say that I'm stuck now and I would appreciate some help.

Please don't withhold information about your own troubleshooting.

There is a big lack of information in your post about your setup. An little explanation about your existing partition layout would be helpful.

I can give you a few pointers regarding what I assume you are struggling with. Since you don't appear to have any available partitions (I am just assuming that the 1.8 T partition is used by the other distro you have installed) that means you will need to shrink an existing partition so you have space to create a new. Resizing partitions is potentially dangerous to your data so make sure you have a backup. Personally I have no experience with resizing partitions.

There are some other cases where you would not need to resize. If your filesystem is btrfs then you can avoid the resizing. You could simply create a new btrfs subvolume and use that for Arch. If on the other hand you are using LVM, you can easily and safely shrink the existing logical partition and create a new logical partition in the LVM container. I might be missing other options here with other special types of filesystems, but this is the kind of information you should provide so it is easier to give you help.

Since I am seeing an EFI partition, I assume your boot method is UEFI. In that case, you generally want to share EFI partition and bootloader between distros, or you could chain bootloaders.

Please read in full https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_guidelines

Thanks for the lending a hand.

> general guidelines

I've read them. The following two bullets are unimportant and can be skipped, but they provide context.
- I would typically provide the text, but this is on a separate machine that's currently in a TTY Arch install so I can't copy and paste from it. I figured providing the full context, even if unfortunately by picture, would be preferable to me with my limited knowledge trying to decide which parts were relevant and manually typing them out here.
- The guidelines encourage research and referring to the web, so I'm not sure how that's reconciled with the rules that say not to expect help if you did research or used the web, so please don't delete my thread for stating: the troubleshooting I've done has consistent of searching the web for clarification and explanation on the arch wiki installation guide (which necessarily implies that I'm reading it and doing my best to understand it), in particular searches in the vein of "partitioning for a second linux install during arch tty install."

> There is a big lack of information in your post about your setup. An little explanation about your existing partition layout would be helpful.

Please understand I'm new, and this is the newbie corner. I made a good-faith attempt to provide all the details I understood to be pertinent. If there are any further details that would be helpful I'm more than happy to try and provide them.

> shrinking the partition

It does appear I'll need to do that, as none of the other cases apply to me. And yes, I prefer to share grub and the swap partition.

___

EDIT: with more keywords to research now, it seems like maybe I can use resize2fs to shrink the filesystem to 90% of desired final size, use parted to shrink the partition to 100% of desired size, then use resize2fs to increase the filesystem size up to the partition size. Then I'll need to find out what to do with the new free space to prepare it for the Arch install. All of this is what I'm searching up now. The documentation seems like it's really helpful if you're already familiar with the process and just need to reference it as a refresher while you're doing it, but it's really not designed for someone who's new to Arch or Linux in general to use as a learning resource (nor am I saying it should be, but it requires me to have to reference other resources to at least supplement the arch documentation, which makes the whole process harder as you guys don't like to link external resources even though the guidelines encourage researching and using the web). Like, the dictionary is really good for understanding words, but you wouldn't use a dictionary (or even a dictionary AND an encyclopedia) to learn a language.

Last edited by Mudpie (2022-09-01 19:56:34)

Daerandin

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2013-05-07

Posts: 280

Website

Re: Need help partitioning new dual-boot install

The guidelines encourage research and referring to the web, so I'm not sure how that's reconciled with the rules that say not to expect help if you did research or used the web

I would very much like to see where in the rules it says that. I'm tempted to just walk away right now because this seems like trolling.

Giving the benefit of doubt here and moving on.

To get text output from the TTY, look at the examples here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … ted_client

In any case, partition resizing is something I recommend using higher level tools for. The easiest method would be to use something like the gparted live iso, or the live iso of another linux distro that includes gparted on the iso.

Mudpie

Member

Registered: 2022-09-01

Posts: 9

Re: Need help partitioning new dual-boot install

The guidelines encourage research and referring to the web, so I'm not sure how that's reconciled with the rules that say not to expect help if you did research or used the web

I would very much like to see where in the rules it says that. I'm tempted to just walk away right now because this seems like trolling.

Giving the benefit of doubt here and moving on.

To get text output from the TTY, look at the examples here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … ted_client

In any case, partition resizing is something I recommend using higher level tools for. The easiest method would be to use something like the gparted live iso, or the live iso of another linux distro that includes gparted on the iso.

I'm not trolling, so thanks for sticking with me. Anyways it's in the guidelines as I said, not the rules. I wanted to make sure I'm not going insane or being gaslit, so I double checked and google results show almost universally that guidelines are specifically not mandatary, like the term exists as a distinction from rules (which are mandatory). Not a big deal here, but just to clarify that I was referencing the guidelines, not the rules.

> "the obvious availability of solutions...on the web, and the community's unwillingness to point out the obvious"
> "Arch users are strongly encouraged to do research, make an effort, report back in the thread, help others, get involved, and contribute to the community."
> "Do your own research, continue to troubleshoot, post the results..."

"On the forum" presumably means from other users (not arch staff) on the forum, which in turn presumably means from our collective general experience and knowledge outside of archlinux.org. This is necessarily true, unless I'm misunderstanding this and we're literally expected to serve each other as arch wiki search engines, serving up no helpful info beyond pure links to arch wiki documents. "On the web" doesn't need explanation, that is certainly referring to outside of archlinux.org. The general spirit of the guidelines, as I gathered from reading them, is to be helpful, and to do your due diligence as far as research including research outside of archlinux.org, and then to use your knowledge to solve your own problems and to help others solve their problems. "Contributing to the community" in terms of helping on the forums must include knowledge from outside of archlinux.org, else the "contribution" is nothing other than pointers all leading back to the same internally already-known already-contributed info.

But yes, moving on, and again thank you. Regarding the TTY output, are you saying those tools can capture the output and send it off to a website that I can reference on a different machine? If so that's extremely cool, but I hope it's not mandatory in the Newbie Corner where simply surviving the TTY install is for many of us a big enough load. I saw another thread where a guy had the same issue (not being able to reproduce a page(s) of text during TTY install) and nobody called him out for it, but maybe that was an exception?

The two relevant points I have are these:

1. If I use some other partitioning tool, can I simply select the partition during the install, or will I have to manually assign a mount point, choose its filesystem (whatever that means, I'm looking at the archinstall guided process ATM), and other stuff? I don't mind doing the extra work, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of what exactly I need to do so I can proceed with the install.

2. I have the pic I linked in the OP. It shows start and end sectors, sector sizes, and all kinds of info. Is that not sufficient to use this screen in the archinstall guided process (https://i.imgur.com/SpdCyDa.jpg) to do the equivalent (like resizing with a live iso)? This way I could do everything via the arch installer? It feels like cheating if I resort to some gui or third party live iso to do some of the work, but if it's built in that seems fine to me. To be clear, I would do everything the TTY method, only using the archinstall guided tool to resize the drive/partitions/etc.

Last edited by Mudpie (2022-09-01 21:20:15)