Partitioning
In this screen you can see
the content of your hard drive(s) and see the solutions the DrakX
partitioning wizard found for where to install
Mageia.
The options available from
the list below will vary depending on your particular hard drive(s) layout
and content.
Use Existing
PartitionsIf this option is
available, then existing Linux compatible partitions have been found
and may be used for the installation.Use Free SpaceIf you have unused
space on your hard drive then this option will use it for your new
Mageia installation.Use Free Space on a
Windows PartitionIf you have unused
space on an existing Windows partition, the installer may offer to use
it.This can be a useful
way of making room for your new Mageia installation, but is a risky
operation so you should make sure you have backed up all important
files!Note that this
involves shrinking the size of the Windows partition. The partition
must be "clean", meaning that Windows must have closed down correctly
the last time it was used. It must also have been defragmented,
although this is not a guarantee that all files in the partition have
been moved out of the area that is about to be used. It is highly
recommended to back up your personal files.With this option, the installer displays the remaining Windows
partition in light blue and the future Mageia partition in dark blue
with their intended sizes just under. You have the possibility to
adapt these sizes by clicking and dragging the gap between both
partitions. See the screen-shot below. Erase and use Entire
Disk.This option will use
the complete drive for Mageia.Note! This will
erase ALL data on the selected hard drive. Take care!If you intend to use
part of the disk for something else, or you already have data on the
drive that you are not prepared to lose, then do not use this
option.Custom disk
partitioningThis gives you
complete control over the placing of the installation on your hard
drive(s).
Partition sizing:
The installer will share the available place out according to the
following rules:
If the total available place is lower than 50 GB, only one
partition is created for /, there is no separate partition for
/home.If the total available place is over 50 GB, then three
partitions are created6/19 of the total available place is allocated to / with a
maximum of 50 GB1/19 is allocated to swap with a maximum of 4 GBthe rest (at least 12/19) is allocated to /home
That means that from 160 GB and over of available place, the installer
will create three partitions: 50 GB for /, 4 GB for swap and the rest for
/home.
If you are using an UEFI system, the ESP (EFI System Partition) will
be automatically detected, or created if it does not exist yet, and
mounted on /boot/EFI. The "Custom disk partitioning" option is the only
one that allows to check it has been correctly done
If you are using a Legacy (as known as CSM or BIOS) system with a
GPT disk, you need to create a Bios boot partition if not already
existing. It is an about 1 MiB partition with no mount point. Choose to be able to create it with the Installer like any
other partition, just select BIOS boot partition as filesystem
type.
Some newer drives are now using 4096 byte logical sectors, instead
of the previous standard of 512 byte logical sectors. Due to lack of
available hardware, the partitioning tool used in the installer has not
been tested with such a drive. Also some ssd drives now use an erase block
size over 1 MB. We suggest to pre-partition the drive, using an
alternative partitioning tool like gparted, if you own such a device, and
to use the following settings:
"Align to" "MiB"
"Free space preceding (MiB)" "2"
Also make sure all partitions are created with an even number of
megabytes.