partitioning new disk in AIF: cfdisk and fdisk disagree?

cfr · 2011-11-28 00:25:04

I am trying to install Arch for the first time and I am trying to do it on a new machine. I used the cfdisk programme to partition my disk. I made sure that no partition had an asterisk so they would all be aligned.

However, fdisk -l now tells a different story and reports all but one of my partitions as not starting on a physical sector boundary.

I'm wondering whether it would be better to cut my losses now and start again, first partitioning with a tool like gparted? I only mention this one because I think that's what I used on my current machine and fdisk doesn't have a problem with this one. However, this machine is using a different partition map (APM rather than MBR) so the initial partitioning was done with Apple's disk utility. Linux partitions were then created with gparted, though, and those are also reported as aligned by fdisk.

I would really prefer to use a GPT partition map on the new machine but I know I can convert to that later and I'm not sure if I can get things setup correctly if I do that initially since there doesn't seem to be an option to choose grub2 as a boot loader in installer (although the docs suggest it should be possible).

Note that I am not really familiar with my new machine yet and I am dealing with rather different hardware which may not be helping.

cfr · 2011-11-29 02:23:40

So I decided to cut my losses, persuaded my IT department to give me admin rights to a Windows box and created a USB key for Parted Magic. (I now realise I could probably have used parted but I didn't realise that was on the Arch install key.) After a lot of faffing with errors from gparted, I got my disk partitioned using GPT and I got my partitions set up with file systems, including an initial 2MB one with no filesystem which I think grub2 needs later.

I booted back into the Arch installer and tried to proceed. Obviously, I don't want to use cfdisk because it cannot handle GPT so I tried to skip to the configuring block devices step. However, the installer thinks all of my partitions are raw with no label and no filesystem on them. parted confirms they are set up correctly and I used parted to set the bios_grub flag as I couldn't figure out how to do this in gparted.

My question is: how to I assign mount points for the new system? Maybe that's not the right term. How do I tell the installer that root should go on partition x, boot on partition y, home on partition z etc.? It thinks that there are no filesystems on these partitions and I do not want it to change the partitions I set up with gparted/parted.

I've read the instructions for setting up grub2 but they seem to assume that I can get through all stages of the installation bar installing the boot loader and I'm obviously not getting that far. What I want to do is figure out how to do the very last part of the disk preparation - just telling it where to put things, basically.

One thing I wondered was whether I could just mount the correct filesystems in the relevant places under /mnt and skip the device preparation stages in the installer altogether. But I'm not entirely clear what has to happen at this stage so I'd like some advice.

When I exited the installer, I ran report issues. Not because I think there's an issue to report but because I thought somebody might ask me something I didn't think to notice. The url it gave me is http://sprunge.us/JjQH.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-11-28 00:25:04

partitioning new disk in AIF: cfdisk and fdisk disagree?

#2 2011-11-29 02:23:40

Re: partitioning new disk in AIF: cfdisk and fdisk disagree?

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