Hi, I have some questions regarding the dual boot setup of EndeavourOS with Windows 11
First of all, let me explain what i want in terms of partitioning:
My laptop is Lenovo ThinkBook 14 and this machine had an hdd with 1TB capacity but i later purchased an SSD of 256gb, Now my windows 11 installation is in SSD while the HDD is being used for storage purposes.
RIght now, I have 50 GB unallocated space in SSD for the / partition. My SSD of course also contains an 100 MB EFI partition which was automatically created by windows.
In HDD, I have 100 GB unallocated for /home partition.
Now here are my questions:
Will the Endeavour OS installer automatically create the swap file just like the ubuntu installer where it automatically creates a swap file directly under the / partition. My laptop has 4 GB RAM
Can I use the existing EFI partition which is of 100 MB if i use GRUB Bootloader. If yes, then do i have to use /boot flag or /boot/efi flag. If it’s possible, please guide me through this part because i really do not want to mess up my windows installation.
And lastly, If i wanna use systemd-boot instead of GRUB, how can i configure this. A point here to note is that it’s okay for me if the systemd-boot will only be able to load EndeavourOS and not windows 11. I would want a setup where i start my laptop and it boots into systemd-boot and then i can boot into EndeavourOS. If i wanna go to windows 11, i can just use the BIOS boot menu to do so.
If you guys want any screenshots of the partitions or any sort of info about my laptop, im ready to share those as well
Alright!
But will 50 GB be enough for /home, /root and a 4 GB swap file considering I’ll put /Documents, /Downloads, /Videos, e.t.c directories in my HDD?
Yes, it should be. Most of the data of size is in those other places. Also, given the way Linux works, you can always move things around later. For example, you could move your pacman package cache to your HDD as well.
I might use systemd-boot since i tried ubuntu before and the grub bootloader was causing issues with my system. Long story short, my system would require multiple restarts for me to boot into any operating system with the grub bootloader. This forum explains my issue very well:
The guy was having problems with the previous version of grub bootloader( version 2.04 ) and in my case, my grub bootloader’s version was 2.12 when i tried installing ubuntu but i got the same problem, so i guess it’s just long standing upstream grub issue which might also be present in grub that ships with EndeavourOS.
So i might need to shift to systemd-boot if that grub issue is still present otherwise i’d be happy to stick with grub always.
Since you recommend that I put /home in my ssd, can i then just use the replace a partition method in the installer and just replace that 50 gb unallocated space?
After the installation, how will I be able to use my HDD?
Yes. You should put a partition in the space first. It doesn’t matter what kind. Just put a partition there that the installer can replace.
You can use a gui partition manager to partition the space on your HDD. The mount it somewhere like /storage.
Then create a bunch of directories inside of it like documents, videos, etc. Then either symlink or bind mount them into ~. If you have any trouble we can help you with that after you get installed.
It took alot of time though, maybe because the installation was online since I wanted the xfce desktop environment. Anyways, it’s done and I have successfully booted into the system. Grub menu also works as expected
Now as I have booted into my system for the first time, it gives me a lot of options like update mirrors for arch reflect and endeavouros, and also system updates, are these necessary?
Also, I’d like to know how I can use the 100 GB unallocated space in my hdd as my personal storage in endeavour os
Updating the mirrors is always a good thing. You do not need to run and Update since you installed from the online option. However keep in mind that this is build on Arch which is Rolling so there are updates daily.
first you need to give it a format (ext4,btrfs) then assign it to what you want
ex /home/$USER/100gbextrastorage.
