Hi,
I just bought a Dell laptop that came along with W10. I reduced the volume of this OS to about 1/3 of a 1TB HDD. I left about 600 GB of the disk free to install Tumbleweed. When I began the installation I noticed that there were other partitions, as you can see here So Tumbleweed was installed in a logical partition.
I would like it to be installed in a primary partition and my data in another primary partition too.
That implies that I would need to erase some partitions. My question is:
Can I put “Recovery Partition” of W10 in a USB? (So in case, I can re-install W10 OS back)
If I erase those “recovery partitions” is it possible to convert the logical partition to a primary partition? Or should I erase it and make a fresh install from scratch?
I’m having some (small) issues that didn’t see in another lap with Tumbleweed also installed.
Could you, please, help me with this?
Thanks
Hello, there are some steps you need to follow:
- You need to defrag and “shrink” the W10 partition. This is best done using the Windows “create and format hard disk partitions”.
- Other proprietary steps you probably are familiar with (disable bitlocker locking down the whole drive, disable fast boot, etc.).
- “Recovery partition” is typically not very useful, it’s often not a partition used for factory reset, if it is anything less than 7GB, it is “Windows Recovery” partition, which pretty much does nothing. This partition can be safely erased in Windows using diskpart.
- After step 1, you will have some “raw” disk space to work with, and you can create new partitions here.
Based on what you posted, I strongly recommend making sure you know what partitions you are making (seperate /boot/efi partition for OpenSUSE just in case if you want to go back to W10 without OpenSUSE).
You have misunderstood that.
You image shows that you are using UEFI with GPT partitioning. There are only primary partitions with GPT. There is no such thing as a logical partition for GPT.
You do appear to have installed to an LVM. That’s a partition configured as logical volumes. But that is not the same thing as a logical partition.
If you want to reinstall without an LVM, you could do that. But you would not need to delete any Windows partitions. You can have many (I think, up to 128) primary partitions with GPT partitioning. To reinstall, you would need to delete that LVM partition to create free space. The installer should be able to create several partitions in that space. But I’m not sure why you are unhappy with the LVM setup. It should work fine. You have not given any details on what is going wrong.
Hi, Thank you very much for your reply.
When I installed, the installer gave me only the option of a LVM (which I thought it was a logical partition, but you explained me it is not). What I wanted was a partition to dump my data independently: make home in that partition and independent of the partition where the system installs.
The main reason is that I don’t have a home partition. Also, I haven’t been able to configure the touchpad (it is ‘wild’: at moments works fine; and the next minute is too sensitive).
When I close the lid of the laptop I cannot wake up the machine and have to hard-shutdown to reinitiate the system.
In Dolphin, suddenly, appear some files which I didnot create: ’ .directory’ and I assume that something didnot configured correctly.
Usin “gvim” I cannot “source” the file ’ .vimrc ’ and every time I try to use the program the fonts change to symbols. I can fix this, everytime, but it’s a little annoying. I think something didnot installed correctly. (Am i exagerating?)
Hi, I thank you very much for your reply.
My main concern is that I didnot want an LVM partition but, a partition for the system and another partition for home so I can dump data safely (if the system fails). The installer didnot give me the option of several partitions. Just the LVM.
Do you know if the recovery partition can be put in a flash memory?
By the way, I shrank W10 without defrag.
Actually, it does give more choices. But the screen may be confusing.
You might need to click the “Guided” button to get all options.
There should be a box for using an LVM. If you don’t want that, then leave that box unchecked.
There should be a box for having a separate “/home”. I’m not sure, but that might be on the next screen (after the one with the LVM choice). Based on your post, you do want to check that box.
Honestly, I have never used LVM so I cannot comment what to do with the LVM, it seems nrickert has a much better idea than I do. I can however tell you the partition table that I typically make:
I use “Expert Partitioning” and start with “Existing Partitions”
- As you’ve done, (defrag [apparently not always necessary]) and shrink Windows partition using Windows application.
- Boot with installation DVD/Flash drive with UEFI setting.
- Create the following partition table:
~250MiB /boot/efi “FAT”
~125GiB / “ext4” [this is your systems/root partition]
~(40% of what’s leftrest) /home “ext4” [this is your home partition]
~(rest) data “NTFS” created from Windows side and mount to /mnt/Data_drive, and symbolically linked to ~/Desktop.
(some if not many would prefer BTRFS for root and home, I am still clinging onto ext4 after a few bad experiences with BTRFS).
Please also note that you should put “SWAP” in there somewhere if you are using HDD and not a lot of ram. I personally don’t because typically my root partitions are installed into an SSD and all my machines have at least 32GB RAM.
You can shove the recovery partition bit-by-bit into a flash drive if you wish using any linux terminal with this method: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/536408-Distro-invariant-SSD-HDD-cloning-procedure-to-an-equal-size-or-large-size-using-dd
but I am not sure if has an entry in the Windows /efi partition or not. You can clone it to a flash drive, but I cannot say a word about whether it will still be usable.
Hi,
Thank you so much for all your replies. I will try to reinstall following your suggestions.
Cheers 
Hi,
I greatly appreciate your suggestions. I re-installed the system. Now I have a home partition and some issues were fixed.
But I’m having hard time when I close the lid of the lap. It’s a Dell machine. It doesn’t wake up when I lift the lid. I have to turn the lap off by pressing the on/off button and turn it on again.
Do you know what to do in this case?