NAME

partition — partitioning and formatting a disk for rawnix

DESCRIPTION

rawnix boots through UEFI, so the disk needs a GPT partition table with an EFI system partition. Everything else is free. The file systems are then mounted under /mnt the way they will be at run time.

Partitioning and formatting destroy what is on the disk. The installer refuses nothing here; check the device name twice.

Finding the disk

# lsblk

lists the disks and their partitions. SATA and USB disks are called /dev/sdX, with partitions /dev/sdX1, X2 ...; NVMe disks /dev/nvme0n1, with partitions /dev/nvme0n1p1, p2 .... The stick the installer runs from is one of them.

Partitioning

# fdisk /dev/sdX

In fdisk(8):

g: create a new, empty GPT partition table;
n: add a partition: first the EFI system partition, 1 GiB (+1G), then the rest as you like;
t: set the type of partition 1 to “EFI System”;
w: write the table and quit.

A simple layout:

/dev/sdX1	1 GiB	EFI System	/boot/efi
/dev/sdX2	rest	Linux filesystem	/

Separate partitions for /home, /var or swap are added the same way.

Formatting

The EFI system partition is always FAT32:

# mkfs.fat -F32
  /dev/sdX1

For an unencrypted system, make the file systems and mount them, root first:

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX2
# mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt

ext4, xfs (mkfs.xfs) and btrfs (mkfs.btrfs) are available. Further partitions are mounted below /mnt, for example /mnt/home. A swap partition is prepared with mkswap; genfstab(8) lists every swap partition it can see.

For an encrypted system, use genluks(8) instead, which formats and mounts everything in one go; see encryption(7).

The EFI system partition

Either way, mount it last, at /mnt/boot/efi:

# mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi
# mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/boot/efi

It must be mounted before the kernel is installed; see bootloader(7).