How to partition second hard drive for dual boot
It has one root partition which contains all the user and system data, and the swap partition as well. In my case I created the following layout: To create the swap partition, you need to create a new primary partition and select "swap area" as its file system: If you decide to separate the home partition, create it now as a primary partition with the desired size: Adjust the partition size you want to give to Linux Mint, set the mount point to "/" (root) and leave the file system as ext4: Press the "+" button to add a new partition.
It will show you the partitions on your hard drive. To create the desired partition layout when installing Linux Mint, switch the installer's page to "something else": If you worry about slowdown issues, then just create the swap partition 2 x the size of your RAM. A swap file is slightly slower than a dedicated partition but is still quite usable. As for the swap partition, you can instead have a swap file. You can even reinstall the operating system and format all the other partitions and keep your /home partition with all your data and app preferences intact!Īs I said above, you can omit all these separate partitions and you can have only the /root partition. That way, you can unmount the /home partition and perform system maintenance without risk of data loss. The reason I made a separate /home partition is for data safety.
And the Home partition contains all the user data, that is why it has the largest size.īut there is no actual reason to have a separate /boot partition unless you have some exotic or encrypted file system for the root (/) partition which cannot be read by the Linux kernel directly. The swap partition is used when your system needs to move memory pages between the RAM and the disk. The root partition contains the operating system files, logs and configuration files. The boot partition has the boot loader files. Personally, I prefer having the following partition layout: When installing, you can omit most of them and have only a single partition where your Linux distribution will be installed.
Actually, there is no reason to have lots of partitions. It is a myth that Linux requires many partitions on the hard drive.
How to partition second hard drive for dual boot how to#
The swap file How to partition your hard drive for Linux Mint