Hello all, sorry for such a newbish question, as I should probably know how to properly partition a hard drive, but I really don’t know where to start. So what I’m looking to do is install a Debian distro, RHEL, and Arch. Want to go with Mint LMDE, Manjaro, and Fedora. I do not need very much storage, so I don’t think space is an issue. I have like a 500+ something GB ssd and the few things that I do need to store are in a cloud. I pretty much use my laptop for browsing, researching, maybe streaming videos, and hopefully more programming and tinkering as I learn more; that’s about all… no gaming or no data hoarding.

Do I basically just start off installing one distro on the full hard drive and then when I go to install the others, just choose the “run alongside” option? or would I have to manually partition things out? Any thing to worry about with conflicts between different types of distros, etc.? hoping you kind folks can offer me some simple advice on how to go about this without messing up my system. It SEEMS simple enough and it might be so, but I just don’t personally know how to go about it lol. Thanks alot!!

  • @[email protected]OP
    1•1 year ago

    Oh ok thanks. I just coulda swore I saw a hibernation setting in BIOS. That’s another thing, would I have to create a Bios partition? this is a tad more confusing that I thought. Also determining the proper sizes of everything. What about an efi partition? or is that only associated with Windows? I have no clue

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      There are no BIOS partitions - you may be confusing the term with the BIOS partition scheme, but that doesn’t matter in this context “BIOS partitions” do exist, but they are irrelevant on modern machines - they are for booting GPT disks on systems that only support MBR disks.

      If you need an EFI partition, the first installer will create one. As for the sizes, the recommendation in the other comment makes sense to me (one ≈60 GB partition per distro, one swap partition and one partition for your personal files that uses the remaining space on the disk).

      • @[email protected]OP
        1•1 year ago

        I mean SHOULD I make an efi partition? I have no clue if I need it or if it’s optional. Simple is better in my case lol. SOO just trying to put it all together so far. first create a roughly 8gb fat32 partition for swap? Then a 60gb ext4 partition for distro 1, then so on with the other two partitions and thats it? how does the storage partition work? what format should that be? and I was reading about mount points and stuff, what ought I know about those?

        • @[email protected]
          2•1 year ago

          If the installer doesn’t automatically create an EFI partition, you can create a small FAT16 or FAT32 partition (a few hundred MB should be enough).

          The swap partition is just a swap partition - that is the partition type you select in your partitioning tool.

          The storage partition can be any format you want. If you don’t need to access it from Windows, just use ext4.

          Mount points are similar to drive letters, but more flexible. You can read these Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab

          • @[email protected]OP
            1•1 year ago

            Thanks again. So did you mention it’s not really necessary to install an efi partition? Idk if I need it or not? or is it just better safe than sorry, sorta like a swap?

            • @[email protected]
              2•1 year ago

              If you install your first distro without creating any partitions manually, the installer will probably create an EFI partition. Maybe it wouldn’t need to create one on your specific system, but it will probably do it anyway.

              • @[email protected]OP
                1•1 year ago

                gotcha! now how would that storage partition work? like do you point each distro to that partition? is that how that works?

                • @[email protected]
                  2•1 year ago

                  Usually you create an entry in /etc/fstab that tells the system which partition should be mounted where. I’d do that in each distro once you have installed all of them.

                  • @[email protected]OP
                    1•1 year ago

                    But how do you know which partition should be mounted wear and Im sorta confused by that statement. Like what do you mean by “where”? Aren’t they all on the same hard drive, so wouldn’t they all just mount to your drive?

        • Lvxferre
          2•1 year ago

          If this is a plain computer (desktop/laptop): I’d simply turn EFI off and call it a day.