Question about partitioning SDD after OS is installed

Screenshot from 2018-09-16 01-19-52.png
 


aWZkM0E.jpg


If this were Cub Scouts, I'd get Akela to give you a merit badge :D

You have done well.

Now I have to choof off (Google that) for a bit, so we'll get to fixing the Manjaro as soon as, it should be easy peasy, but it involves a long post or two, and for the benefit of both you and The Viewers, I want to work on its detail first, OK?

Summary is I hope -

  1. You have a working Linux Mint 19 'Tara' Cinnamon on your /dev/sda
  2. You have a Timeshift "backup" of that in a dedicated partition
  3. You have an installed, previously working, Manjaro GNOME on your Solid State Drive /dev/sdb but with the introduction of LM
  4. You now have a Grub Menu with LM at the top followed by Manjaro and when you choose Manjaro to boot, it falls over with a Kernel Panic
If that is accurate, just confirm, and then we'll adjourn for now.

Cheers

Wizard
 
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Yes, all was accurate, except the Manjaro is GNOME, I never was able to get the KDE up and running. Thank you so much for all the help so far! I look forward to learning more!
 
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I've edited that. You are welcome Jeffrey.

Enjoy your Linux and we'll catch up real soon. :D

Wizard
 
He’s a great teacher! I’m on call again tonight , hopefully he can help me get my Manjaro up and running again!
 
Kind words ... I'll take 'em :D:rolleyes:

Jeffrey I work on a triage process (I know you'll be familiar with that concept, lol), so we could wrap this Thread up for the moment, as the subject matter has been covered, effectively.

We don't close Threads around here without a good reason, so it will remain open for further questions on your part or the part of others with similar issues.

For now, I will start a new Thread to help you with your Manjaro, and others with similar probs. With your implicit consent, I will link to this Thread for background reading for others.

The new Thread I am going to place initially in General I think. It may go elsewhere after I consult with Staff, but if so, there will be a redirect in place for those who start following.

I'll see you there soon :D

Wiz

Edited added BTW

BTW like the new avatar :p
 
Kind words ... I'll take 'em :D:rolleyes:

Jeffrey I work on a triage process (I know you'll be familiar with that concept, lol), so we could wrap this Thread up for the moment, as the subject matter has been covered, effectively.

We don't close Threads around here without a good reason, so it will remain open for further questions on your part or the part of others with similar issues.

For now, I will start a new Thread to help you with your Manjaro, and others with similar probs. With your implicit consent, I will link to this Thread for background reading for others.

The new Thread I am going to place initially in General I think. It may go elsewhere after I consult with Staff, but if so, there will be a redirect in place for those who start following.

I'll see you there soon :D

Wiz

Edited added BTW

BTW like the new avatar :p
Sounds good! I'll join you shortly!
 
With each new install you can do manual partitioning, so there was no harm in letting your first distro use the entire disk. But with each new install you'll usually want to re-use your /boot/efi as shown in your image above (if your other laptop is also UEFI based) so that all your bootloaders are stored together. If your other laptop is not UEFI based, you may have trouble with multi-multi-boot anyway. If you create a /home as a separate partition, you'll also want to re-use that usually between all of the distros. So your / folder might be able to be be a bit less than 30 GB if /home is separate.

But another school of thought says to let each distro have a / folder and let everything, including /home, be contained within that. In that case, 30 GB may not be enough. I just installed Mint Cinnamon as a fresh install along with a few of my favorite apps and I'm already up to about 50 GB of disk space. The reasoning for not using /home among multiple distros is that the apps that each distro runs may be of different versions... all competing for the same config files which may have differences between the app versions. But this is speculation... I have no idea what apps you may decide to run, or which may present conflicts with configuration differences.

You're at a great point though... experiment! If you want to start over and do a manual install/partitioning.... go for it. But follow up and jump in fairly soon with your next distro and set it up too. Follow up again with a third distro. You will be proficient more quickly, and you may have a mistake or two along the way. That's okay, mistakes are great teachers! @wizardfromoz is the Master of multi-boot, and no doubt he will have excellent advice for you.

Cheers

Re-reading your advice because I am planning to put another distro on my SSD (now that @wizardfromoz has helped with the kernel panic problems w/ Manjaro). As I read your advice I want to be sure I am understanding.
1. Use manual partitioning
2. When you say "reuse" my /boot/efi for more distros, can I use the same /boot/efi partition as the existing distro? For instance, on the SSD I want to multi-multi boot from Manjaro is currently installed, if I want to m-m boot and add say LM19 XFCE as my next distro do I create another /boot/efi? I am not sure how to "re-use" the existing /boot/efi.
3. Same question for the /home partition - I assume that by sharing the /home partition between the distros that will allow me to access all of my files regardless of the distro?

Screenshot from 2018-09-21 20-59-17.png


This is the current partitioning.

Thanks!
 
I'll pick up and run with this one.

Jeffrey, this would be a good time to start labelling partitions, in particular your / partition, with the name of the Distro, do it in Jeffrey-friendly terms eg LM19-Cinn

Note I say label, not Name.

Note what Capta (@CptCharis ) said here, at #2 https://www.linux.org/threads/quest...g-sdd-after-os-is-installed.19701/#post-58426 ... which said, in part

  1. You will need to boot from the live cd
  2. Open up gparted and choose to resize the current Linux partition
  3. Shrink it from the end
  4. Now that you have shrunk your partition, there will be some empty space at the end of the drive. Right click on it and pick format. Choose the filesystem and label for it
  5. Press edit > apply all operations

... my highlighting.

When I suggested your setting up a Timeshift partition and a Data partition on your hard drive, /dev/sda, and labelling them, you set up the partitions and named them.

No harm, but not as useful.

The labelling field does not allow as many characters as the name partition field, it might be 14 - 16, but a bonus is that that label then appears in your File Managers, and it makes it easier for us to read which Distros are which, with their /'s.

Example from my Caja FM under Ubuntu 18.04.1 'Bionic Beaver' MATE:


COEep7u.png


SCREENSHOT 1 - MY CAJA VIEW LEFT-HAND PANE

Note straight away how easy (for me) it makes to see what Distros I gave on, and with abbreviations such as HDD, SSD, and WD for the Western Digital My Book ... where they are :)

For the entries that say Ex-Adata-1 and 2wayAdataDocs, yours might read DATA.

For the ones that read 21GB volume, I often use "DistroReady", meaning I will install one there, and it will be the Distro's /

The 2 x Timeshift is simply indicative of my first setting up a 100 GB space on the HDD /dev/sda, before then setting up a 400 GB one on the WD external. One will be migrated to the other, perhaps.

If you could go ahead and do that with both your /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, it would help you and us.

All of this comes via GParted, and you will see the extra fields generated as you perform the operation.

Wizard
 
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Got it! I will get to work on that this weekend. I attempted to shrink the partition on my ssd w/ Manjaro which resulted in my inability to boot. I’m not getting a kernel panic error this time (see above). I may just repartition and reinstall on the ssd.
 
Hi Jeffery... glad the Wizard jumped back in so quickly. He is definitely the authority on multi-booting. And I am out of town at the moment so not spending much time online.

But for the current crisis above, boot up on any live distro you have and follow the directions to see if it will repair your Manjaro installation. When a live version is running, open a terminal and give it:
Code:
fsck /dev/sdb2

Let it finish, reboot, and hopefully it works again.

Cheers
 
Thank you! I’m not sure what happened as all I did was shrink the existing partition so I could load another distro. I have mint installed on the hdd and it is working well. Could I run the above command from a terminal in LM?

You guys are the best! Can’t thank you enough!
 

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