Can't see all my partitions

DevonSix · 2008-12-16 13:59:03

Hello.

I'm trying to install Arch Linux on an external hard drive. I have an iMac. But, during "Selecting filesystem mount points", not all of my partitions are shown - only first 6 of them. That's too small for me to install it. I already had Arch on my other PC and it worked fine cause I didnt have shit loads of partitions Well, is there any fix for that? Scrolling down doesnt help of course. SOME partitions of the external drive ARE shown tho, but not the ones I want. Damn, I want Arch! It's the best OS ever ^^

Thanks,
Dev

Xyne · 2008-12-16 14:19:07

In a second terminal (alt+F2), check if you can see them all with "fdisk -l". If you can see the partitions, you can skip that step in /arch/setup and do it manually, then move on to the next step in the setup once the partitions are formatted and mounted. I'm not sure how to handle swap though (you need "swapon" at some point), and I don't know if setup will automatically configure files later on (e.g. setting the UUIDs for grub).

The basic steps are to create a file system on each partition (mkfs.ext3, mkfs.reiserfs, mkfs.xfs, mkfs.jfs, etc) then to recreate your desired directory structure in /mnt using "mkdir" and "mount", e.g. sda4 as / with ext3, sda5 as /home with reiser:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda4
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/
mkdir /mnt/home
mkfs.reiserfs /dev/sda5
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/home/

All the normal caveats apply: be careful, know which disks you're formatting, etc

Last edited by Xyne (2008-12-16 14:24:54)

DevonSix · 2008-12-16 16:32:08

Thanks Btw. swap is mkswap ^^ And, after I do this, I skip the partitioning in setup and just set all in fstab and things?

Xyne · 2008-12-17 01:29:40

You should be able to continue with the next step in the setup after setting the mount points. Just make sure that you check and double-check fstab, menu.lst, etc. I just did an installation the other day on my old box and I tried to do most of it outside of the setup (just to see if I could), but when I used the setup to install grub and it generated grub's menu.lst, it failed to populate the entries with the UUIDs. I don't remember what I did now but I got it working by going back a few steps in the setup though. At some point I'll need to look into exactly what each step is doing behind the scenes... actually, I'm off to start a thread about that now

Also, welcome to Arch

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-16 13:59:03

Can't see all my partitions

#2 2008-12-16 14:19:07

Re: Can't see all my partitions

#3 2008-12-16 16:32:08

Re: Can't see all my partitions

#4 2008-12-17 01:29:40

Re: Can't see all my partitions

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