Ubuntu server manual partition help
This is a screenshots album of Ubuntu server manual partition guide for a beginner. The manual partition for the Ubuntu desktop screenshots can be found in Ubuntu desktop manual partition guide tutorial.
Ubuntu server manual partition help screenshots are step by step guides for user who wish to manually partition their hard disk during the installation process. There are many reasons why user wants to manually partition their hard disk. Some maybe have other operating system sharing the same hard disk. While others maybe have a large hard disk and do not want Ubuntu server to use entire hard disk space. An experience Linux user choose to manually partition their hard disk because they can customize partition size and Linux mount points.
Make sure you read about Linux file system and directory structure before you continue to partition your hard disk. Understand about important Linux mount points such as /(root), /home, /var, and /usr so that you can assign a suitable partition size for them. Make preparation by properly planning how do you want to set partitions for Ubuntu server.
This is the disk partition screenshot from the Ubuntu installation steps. If you are planning to do hard disk partition manually, choose the manual option at the bottom. This tutorial will guide you to manually partition your hard disk. You can safely follow this guide. If at the end you changed your mind, you can always get back to this page as long as you do not confirm to write all the partition you made to the hard disk.
So, if you want to continue and choose to partition manually, then select the manual menu and hit enter.
It's recommended to use different hard disk for Ubuntu if you are planning to dual boot it with other operating system. In this step, you have an option to choose which hard disk you are planning to put Ubuntu in. You'll see a FAT or NTFS formatted partition if you already have Windows in your computer. If you have created a free space in your hard disk reserved for Ubuntu, it will appear here. If not, choose hard disk to create a partition first.
We have chosen a whole hard disk as an example in this tutorial. Normally, people does not dual boot Ubuntu server. So, we are going to choose a hard disk and create a partition for Ubuntu server in the next step.
In this example, we chose a new hard disk to be partitioned for Ubuntu server. The example here shows only 10GB hard disk size, but it applies the same to a bigger hard disk as well. If you have 300GB hard disk and you don't want to give all the space to Ubuntu server, you can create partition to reserved some space here.
First, we need to create a free space for Ubuntu server. If you already create a dedicated partition for Ubuntu, you will not see this step.
To continue, we choose
Now we back at the same menu as the second step but this time after we have selected a hard disk. The second step is to create partition to the free space in the hard disk. You can create a partition to reserve some space if plan not to dedicate the whole hard disk for Ubuntu server. Select a free space to create partition to continue.
Ubuntu ask how to use this free space? There are three options.
- Create a new partition
- Automatically partition the free space
- Show cylinder/head/sector information
The second option, Automatically partition the free space will make Ubuntu create partitions for us. The third option will just show us information about cylinder/head/sector. Choose the first option, create a new partition to set partition manually.
This is where we slice our free space into different size partitions. You should have a plan of how your Ubuntu partition is going to be and you need to provide a suitable size for it here. Below is what I plan to do with my 10 GB free space for Ubuntu:
- 100 MB for /boot partition
- 512 MB for swap partition
- 4.0 GB for /usr partition
- The rest for root partition
Type in your new partition size. Ubuntu give hints about how you can distribute your free space using percentage here. But for me, I need to put the exact size. Ubuntu didn't mention whether we can use MB here but the default size is in GB so I guess it should be fine to use MB (The answer is YES we can use MB).
Choose partition type, primary or logical. You can create 3 primary partitions and 1 logical. You can create many partitions in the logical.
People do not create partition for every Linux directory. The basic concept of partition is to keep data safe and tidy in their respective space. Normally, Linux partitions that need to be assigned their own partitions are:
- /boot
- /swap
- /
- /home
- /usr/local
- /var
The / partition are mandatory and the /swap partition are recommended. Other mount points depend on what the end system would be (what type of Linux server it is). So for the /swap and / partition type, you should choose Primary. If you are planning to create partitions for all directories above, choose logical for the third partition. That's the basic idea.
Choose location for the new partition. This could be at the beginning or at the end of the hard disk. If you are planning to create this partition for /boot, choose at the beginning of the hard disk. It doesn't really matter where do choose the location for other mount points. Just choose at the beginning for every mount points sorting from their priority unless you have your reason not to do so.
You can edit or set new partition setting to the partition you just created here. You can set file system type for the partition using the Use as: options. Set mount point for the partition or label your partition. Please set a bootable flag for /boot partition if you create it. Otherwise, set the bootable flag to the / partition. Use arrow key to select the menu and press enter to choose.
Choosing mount point for the new partition. I recommend you create the first partition for /boot, then swap space, following by root and others.
Turn bootable flag for boot partition. That's it. We have finished setting up our first partition. Click Done setting up the partition menu to go back to the first menu and repeat the steps above to create the next partition. Usually, I'd go for swap partition before others.
For the size of the swap partition, use the physical memory (RAM) size as a reference. Normally, the swap size is double RAM size. For example, if your RAM size is 2GB, the swap size would be 4GB. However, if you have 4GB RAM, and going for 8GB swap size seems a bit large, you can also set it the same size as your physical memory.
Swap is using hard disk as a memory which is slower than a normal RAM. In Ubuntu, all daemons and running services using memory space (RAM). The swap space is a backup memory in case Ubuntu is short of memory space.
If you create a second partition to be a swap space, then choose the Use as: menu to set it for swap area.
After the swap partition, you can continue creating other partitions. Remember, you can create only four primary partitions. If you planning to create more than four partitions, reserve one partition for logical. Then you can create how many partitions you want.
This is an example of the final overview of currently configured partitions. Click Finish partitioning and write changes to disk.
Write changes to disk. So this is the final installation step. There is no turning back after this.
You can start again now if you are not satisfied with the partitions you've created. If you proceed, all data in the disk will be erased. So that's it. I hope you know what you are doing. Good luck.
Popular content
Post new comment