Does Arch's auto-prepare for hard drivers make a separate /home?

The Orange Peanut · 2008-03-16 06:35:24

I followed the Beginner's Guide wiki to install Arch on my old PC. I was screwing around with it and noticed that the output of df seems to indicate that there are 4 partitions; /, boot, swap, and /home. The installation guide doesn't say anything about making a separate /home partition, so I installed gparted just to look at a graphical representation of my partition table and it seemed to confirm that there was indeed a separate /home partition.

I'm fairly new to Linux so maybe I'm just looking at this wrong, but I was just wonder. I want to install Arch on the PC I actually use daily but I wanted to make sure I was familiar with it before I formatted my HDD on my other PC (which could turn into a problem if I couldn't get everything working seeing that I'm a CS major and do most of my homework on my own box). Here is the output of df -m

[nelson@beta-pc ~]$ df -m
Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3                 7390      2222      4793  32% /
none                       220         0       220   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1                   38        10        27  28% /boot
/dev/sda4                 1946       105      1742   6% /home
[nelson@beta-pc ~]$

As you can see, it looks like I have a 2 gig /home partition... is that right? When I finally do install Arch I want to just have a root partition that houses my /home folder as well and a boot and swap (because I keep all my data on an external). That means I have to use the manual partition editor when I do the installation, right?

Sorry for the rambling, hope you understand my questions

Allan · 2008-03-16 06:51:16

From the installation guide it appears it does not make a separate /home partition:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beg … Hard_Drive

I thought it did and it appear to have on your install, but that might have changed in recent versions of the installer. Anyway, the manual partitioning is actually fairly simple to use. Not harder than the rest of the installation.

Last edited by Allan (2008-03-16 06:52:31)

Phineas · 2008-03-16 20:42:58

At first I used the auto prepare and I remember it making seperate /boot, / and /home partitions. I believe it allowed me to change the actual size of them also if I wanted. After doing that I knew what size to make my /boot partition and all the other time's which I've re-installed it I have set the partitions manually.

As I downloaded the ISO last week it should be fairly up to date.

Misfit138 · 2008-03-16 21:30:36

That section of the beginner's guide was taken from the official install guide, which seemed a bit ambiguous about which partitions the the auto prepare option actually installed. I have updated it to include the /home partition, which is what it seems to do.
(I have never personally used the auto-prepare option, or I would have added it off the bat.)
Sorry about the confusion.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-03-16 06:35:24

Does Arch's auto-prepare for hard drivers make a separate /home?

#2 2008-03-16 06:51:16

Re: Does Arch's auto-prepare for hard drivers make a separate /home?

#3 2008-03-16 20:42:58

Re: Does Arch's auto-prepare for hard drivers make a separate /home?

#4 2008-03-16 21:30:36

Re: Does Arch's auto-prepare for hard drivers make a separate /home?

Board footer