Partitioning Help Please

[Member dukester]

I need further partioning help please!

My ASUS N53SV shipped with:
BIOS is American Megatrends which has the following (besides others):

UEFI Boot – enabled
if I disable UEFI boot, then it would revert to MBR boot?

PXE ROM – disabled => For network booting?

Hard Drive BBS Priorities => no problems I can adjust those
Delete Boot option -> Remove an EFI boot option from the boot order
What is this for?
On the save & exit page, there’s an option: “Launch EFI shell from filesystem device”
What is this?

How can I determine if this ASUS is BIOS-based or not? Or is it both?

How can I tell whether my system’s software interface between the OS & firmware is UEFI?

I ask because I want to know if I’m stuck with MBR partitioning or can / should I use GPT partioning?

When I install antiX-22, I want to carve out the 1Tb Barracuda HDD for 2 other Linux distros as well.

I would like to have a common swap partition, usable by all 3 distros

I have `gparted’ on a bootable dvd.
Should I pre-carve the HDD before installing antiX-22 and the other distros?

OR

can I simply install antiX first, and carve out what I need of the HDD at config-time, leaving the rest of the HDD space for the other distros?

Thanks again for everyone’s help.

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dukester

[Member Robin]

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Please read https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/identifying-computer%27s-firmware-in-asus-n53sv-4175510152/

This board seems to have some kind of weird dual bios/uefi combination. Probably best to stick to what the people there have found out about it.

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[Member dukester]

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Thx! I like your “tagline”! So true IMHO & experience. 😀

I ran “dmidecode” – zero EFI/UEFI support shown.

It’s MBR for me I suppose. I’ll disable UEFI support.

BUT – come to think about it, wouldn’t the original Windows7 need UEFI?
What a cluster-fxxx this is! LOL

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by dukester.

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dukester

[Member dukester]

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More advise please!

Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 976476159 976474112 465.6G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda2 976476160 980672511 4196352 2G Linux swap
/dev/sda3 980672512 980673535 1024 512K FreeBSD boot
/dev/sda4 980673536 1945362423 964688888 460G FreeBSD UFS
/dev/sda5 1945362424 1953525134 8162711 3.9G FreeBSD swap

If I delete /dev/sda3 to /dev/sda5, I suppose I have to run `sudo update-grub’ afterwards?

If I then partition the “unallocated space” for future distro installs, do I have have to run `sudo update-grub’ again?
Or only after I actually install a distro?

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dukester

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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You don’t HAVE to update GRUB, but if you remove software, the GRUB configuration will not be accurate, so yes, it is best to run sudo update-grub whenever a kernel changes or a distribution changes or the contents of the disk changes, then you will have an up to date boot loader that only loads existing, up to date bootable images or images it spots that are potential bootable images!

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Also, in further response to your initial inquiry, it is possible to arrange the partitions on the disk with many distributions, including antiX.
It is a lot easier to do it from a live media source because you won’t have any conflicts attempting to mount or remount areas on the disk that are already allocated – though it IS possible to do the job from a disk that is being shared; it’s just more complicated to do it right.

The directions in the links above (which I haven’t explicitly read) should go into detail. Most of the time I can do these tasks without having to consult documentation, but if I need a reminder, either about a specific argument or a handy tool to use and I forget a few details, it’s a quick search away for someone who’s done this probably a couple thousand times over the past forty years (even prior to the introduction of Linux in the early nineties); I didn’t multi-boot UNIX systems, but I did, at one point, have three workstations in my office – an every day UNIX workstation for reading Email, accessing the Internet, and doing development work, a spare workstation, upon which I could install the nightly build of UNIX base level to make sure it would build, and I’d test whatever I was working on, and a third workstation to test interoperability with the Windows NT of the day (prior to XP). Those were the days!

I am using a HP tower desktop at the moment, and it’s running using the legacy kernel of the new antiX 23 Beta 1 image; cool!

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Brian Masinick

[Member dukester]

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I’ll make it a point then to update GRUB whenever I mess with the HDD partition etc.

From antiX-19, I’ll delete the freeBSD partitions right now to practice – I shouldn’t hose anything doing so. LOL

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dukester

[Member dukester]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

but I did, at one point, have three workstations in my office

Solaris?

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dukester

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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dukester wrote:

Brian Masinick wrote:

but I did, at one point, have three workstations in my office

Solaris?

I have used Sun Solaris, but it was after I worked at Digital Equipment on Digital UNIX.

Actually I did have access to a few other UNIX computers because we used to port some of our applications from our version of UNIX to other versions of UNIX, and I took a role as a Systems Administrator for a couple of years because about half of the administrators had junior skills; I joined a leadership group of a couple of people that would take on the “problem servers” and help the junior engineers with their problems.

I know the Math Library group used a couple of UNIX systems including HPUX and Sun Solaris.

Later I worked on financial services applications at Fidelity Investments. We ALSO were moving a LOT of our market data infrastructure from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; knowing both of them and also how to test, I quickly became a leader, and I was assigned the role of User Acceptance Testing Lead to coordinate changes from development to test, to user acceptance to production. One of the best jobs I ever had!

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Brian Masinick

[Member dukester]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

I have used Sun Solaris, but it was after I worked at Digital Equipment on Digital UNIX.

Right! I forgot about DEC Unix! Funny thing – I’m dabbling with Modula-3 which I’m told had roots at DEC.

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dukester

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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YES! Digital did a LOT with many different programming languages, and I’m positive that at least a few people in our company (which is past history, now owned by Hewlett-Packard) had a rich history in multiple operating systems, numerous programming languages, hardware and software innovation, until other companies did it faster and cheaper.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Regarding BIOS – I happen to have BIOS: American Megatrends v: 6.01 date: 09/29/2010 on my Machine: Type: Desktop System: Hewlett-Packard product: s5747c, which I don’t use all the time, but it’s been a handy OLD desktop system for testing.

I’m not sure what any potential “issues” might be, but it’s been fine here and I’ve had no surprises.

My setup looks like this, and you can see by the stats that it’s been up for several hours; I’m testing antiX 23 Beta 1 with this and it’s been doing just fine.

inxi -b
System:
  Host: antix23 Kernel: 6.1.18-antix.1-amd64-smp arch: x86_64 bits: 64
    Desktop: IceWM v: 3.3.2 Distro: antiX-23-beta1-runit_x64-full Grup Yorum 21
    March 2023
Machine:
  Type: Desktop System: Hewlett-Packard product: s5747c v: N/A
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: PEGATRON model: 2A6C v: 5.00 serial: <superuser required>
    BIOS: American Megatrends v: 6.01 date: 09/29/2010
CPU:
  Info: dual core AMD Athlon II X2 255 [MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 3114
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] driver: N/A
  Display: server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.7 driver: X: loaded: nouveau,vesa
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting dri: swrast gpu: N/A resolution: 1024x768
  API: OpenGL v: 4.5 Mesa 22.3.6 renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 15.0.6 128 bits)
Network:
  Device-1: NVIDIA MCP61 Ethernet type: network bridge driver: forcedeth
  Device-2: Ralink RT2790 Wireless 802.11n 1T/2R PCIe driver: rt2800pci
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 698.64 GiB used: 8.9 GiB (1.3%)
Info:
  Processes: 136 Uptime: 4h 45m Memory: 3.58 GiB used: 1.89 GiB (52.7%)
  Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.25

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Just for reading, this is a fairly easy read and might help some people who are relatively new to Linux partition management.

https://averagelinuxuser.com/linux-partitioning-recommendations/

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Here’s a decent forum discussion about boot loader behavior and it happens to mention a particular problem that some people have encountered over the past two years or so.

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=756547#p756547

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Brian Masinick

[Member dukester]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

American Megatrends v: 6.01 date: 09/29/2010

Mine is that old as well, and I too seem to have had zero problems with it.
I disabled EFI – no Windoze malware on this machine – thank you very much! 😀

I nuked my freeBSD partition this morning using `gparted’ from antiX-19. No issues.
I then updated GRUB, but freeBSD still showed up on the GRUB boot menu.
Turns out that I had I had hand-coded /etc/grub.d/40_custom to include freeBSD in the boot menu.
I commented that stuff out.

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dukester

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