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I am currently running Ubuntu 19.04 on my Surface Pro 3 and I have decided to move onto Arch Linux. Reading each installation guide, I keep coming across "partitioning" and I want to know why. What I basically want to do is to wipe my disk and only have Arch on it. I don't want to share my disk with anything else. I will not be dual booting. I only just want to have Arch on my disk. So do I still need to partition?

Also, what is a recommended Arch Linux installation guide for SP3, given that these machines come with keyboard covers.

Andros Adrianopolos
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2 Answers2

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Hi @Androis A disk needs to be partitioned even if you have only one OS running. After wiping your disk it will have un-allocated space which can be taken as a single partition.

But I would recommend that you have two partitions:

  1. /root - to keep your installation of packages
  2. /home - to have your files and documents here
    This has quite a number or advantages.

This is easier to do during installation of an OS; or else you can have this workaround.

Edit:

  • On a personal note... I use single partition / for the whole OS due to a lot of reasons: multiboot, disk-space, SMART, CPU-ISF etc.
  • There's no per-say rule for partitioning but it depends on a lot of factors. It's recommended to have multiple but not mandatory.
Jovial Joe Jayarson
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  • So during installation, how do I make sure that my installation of packages and my personal files are in their designated partition? I am against multiple partitioning because I don't know how much space I need to allocate just for the installation partition and I'd like to have as much space available to me as possible. – Andros Adrianopolos May 29 '19 at 09:51
  • "Installation of packages and my personal files are in their designated partition." They are always so, automatically. If you have a 1 Tb disk the go for around 300 GB for /root & 600 GB for /home. – Jovial Joe Jayarson May 29 '19 at 09:56
  • I have 252GB of disk – Andros Adrianopolos May 29 '19 at 10:07
  • But out of curiosity, what if I just have only 1 partition? What happens then? Will it still work? – Andros Adrianopolos May 29 '19 at 10:09
  • It will, but as you said its only 252 GB if the disk gets filled due to "your files" (not just other sofware packages) it may crash the system, so make a 65 GB for root and rest for your personal files, which will avoid the crash. Your system will boot even if the second partition is full! – Jovial Joe Jayarson May 29 '19 at 10:14
  • How did you decide the number 65gb? – Andros Adrianopolos May 29 '19 at 10:34
  • And what do I do if the root partition is full? – Andros Adrianopolos May 29 '19 at 10:34
  • Oh, Arch Linux ISO size is 609 MB so after installation and updation it will take upto 2-2.5 GB, besides if you want to run heavy things like Android Studio, or R studio or Spyder, TensorFlow etc, they will take up about 40 GB. So if somehow, it gets full you can reinstall Arch to that partition alone without loosing your personal files on the other partition. – Jovial Joe Jayarson May 29 '19 at 10:39
  • I'm running Android Studio, Anaconda, Pycharm, CLion, ROS and many others – Andros Adrianopolos May 29 '19 at 10:43
  • I am running all of these things (except ROS) currently on Ubuntu and I still got 180GB left. – Andros Adrianopolos May 29 '19 at 10:44
  • Yup, I'm just saying, to avoid re-setting the whole Linux configurations if the **only partition fails** you can choose to do multi-partitioning. The answer below does give a little more clarity. **Partition Fail** can be caused by numerous reasons not just disk-fill-up. – Jovial Joe Jayarson May 29 '19 at 10:49
  • So I'm still stick. Why does Ubuntu take less space for this many applications? – Andros Adrianopolos May 29 '19 at 10:50
  • My guess is Linux software has a lot of dependencies. When you install a software new X which is dependent on Y. The latter one is most likely to be already found on your system. – Jovial Joe Jayarson Oct 12 '20 at 17:09
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There's a difference between having one partition and having what's called a superfloppy (no partition table). If you plan on booting from the disk, then you need a partition table and possibly extra partitions.

If you're booting using EFI, then you will need to have a EFI System Partition. If you're booting using BIOS interface, then you may need a BIOS reserved area partition to store the rest of the boot loader from (you will need this with GPT, most tools leave some room after the master boot record with MBR so you won't need this for MBR).

It's also common to put /boot on it's own partition, which may be necessary if you plan on using LUKS2 for your root partition, since GRUB doesn't yet support LUKS2 headers.

Usually I would allocate 250MB for /boot and format the rest of the free space for LVM or /.

Torin
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