Yes. In the new install I referred to earlier there are 30 hidden directories/files that contain configuration settings. A lot of them probably will not be used but are available but I'm not going through all to try to explain there purpose. If you don't do a lot of modifications to personalize your system it should not be a problem. Your firefox bookmarks and things like that are in a hidden configuration directory but those can easily be saved before a reinstall, as an example.

If you have a crash of an installed system and cannot boot it, if you are able to boot your installation medium (DVD/flash) you should be able to access the machine and copy data from it to another source/drive.

Moving the directories you mention such as Documents, Pictures, Videos to your data partiton would work and in fact is precisely the reason for it as it is created to store 'personal' data, data created by the user or obtained by the user. I would not bother moving Desktop as it will be too small to need to be moved. The Templates and Public most users don't use and you could leave the Downloads as after downloading you don't need what you download in that location. If for example, one of your users wants to copy some data to the system from an outside source, pictures from a digital camera for instance, just copy them to the /mnt/data/Pictures directory initially. No reason to copy to the directory in the /home/user.

There is a root directory for the root user which is under the / (root filesystem) and therefore separate from the /home directory and in my experience, a regular user trying to access documents there gets a permission denied.

You can make your /mnt/data/user partitions available to your user at boot and can set specific permissions as indicated previously by the entry in /etc/fstab after install.

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Thank you yancek,

Got it all clear.

Now I could go for the scheme of partitions that you had earlier okayed but with the inclusion of the small 3 GB '/home' partition. So my scheme of partition would be like this;

--50 GB ------- Windows ------ - ntfs ------ Primary
150 GB ------- Local disk ----- - ntfs ------ Primary
--61 GB ------- Unallocated -- - ------ ------ ---------
----3 GB ------- /home ----------- - ext4 ----- Logical
----6 GB ------- Swap ----------- - Swap --- Logical
--30 GB ------- / ------------------- - ext4 ----- Logical

So now shall I go ahead and install accordingly? If you give the go ahead, I will install and update and come back here for the further creation of the 'data' partitions.

Thanking you

Regards

Anil

If your current setup is as shown in your initial post, that should work. What I would suggest is that you create the / (filesystem) partition and the /home partition during the installation. After you have installed, it might be a good idea to leave space after the /home partition and before the /mnt/data/user partitions you create after the install so that it would be easier to expand the /home partition should you feel you need to. Just an option you might want and you can easily do that from gparted. Other than that, it seems like it would fit your initial requirements.

You might like to lookup LVM in your spare time.

Since I would have to create free space with USB installer or else I would have to resize and move partitions through Gparted, the initial setup will have to be changing anyway.

Not even the Swap partition? That too shall be created after installation? Fine.

Point noted.

So now after installation my setup would look like;

--50 GB ------- Windows ------ - ntfs ------ Primary
150 GB ------- Local disk ----- - ntfs ------ Primary
--67 GB ------- Unallocated -- - ------ ------ ---------
----3 GB ------- /home ----------- - ext4 ----- Logical
--30 GB ------- / ------------------- - ext4 ----- Logical

OK then shall I go ahead now and do as above

Thank you

Regards

Anil

Thank you for the suggestion, JeremyBoden.

Yes, also the swap partition. You can create if after install since you will have unallocated space.

Thank you yancek,

I will come back after installation and updating.

Regards

Anil

In one of your early posts, you indicated you already had a swap partition. If you already have one, there is no need to create an 'additional' swap partition. You can have multiple operating systems installed all of which would use the same swap. Since you seem to want a swap of a different size than the current partition, you can do this after installing.

Thank you yancek,

I installed LM17-qiana-cinnamon. I did not create the Swap partition. I did the partition setup as belows;

--50 GB ------- sda1-------Windows ------ - ntfs ------ Primary
150 GB ------- sda2-------Local disk ----- - ntfs ------ Primary
--65 GB ------- sda3-------Unallocated -- - ------ ------ ---------
----3 GB ------- sda5-------/home ----------- - ext4 ----- Logical
--30 GB ------- sda6-------/ ------------------- - ext4 ----- Logical

I updated and installed Gparted through 'Synaptic Package Manager'. Customised the firefox browser. Now to get my system ready and working I would require to create the following,

• a Swap partition

• a data partition for user1

• a data partition for user2

Please kindly guide me on how to do that.

Do I need to create the required user accounts first? Or do I need to create the data partitions first?

Thanking you

Regards

Anil

For your purposes you could probably use GParted from the installed system. There was no reason to download and install it as it should be on the Mint installation medium

What happened to the swap partition you had, did you delete it?
Post the actual output of these two commands:

That is a lower case Letter L in the command

It doesn't matter whether you create the data partitions for your individual users first or create the user accounts first. The link below is an excellent tutorial on using GParted partition manager. After reading it and posting the output of the above commands, post back with any questions.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gparted.html

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When you manually partition you have to create swap manually, which is what OP stated they were going to do in post# 80

Yes. His earlier posts indicated he already had a swap partition so there would be no need to create another one.

You have a problem.

You have 2 Windows partitions + one extended partition containing logical partitions for / and /home.
You are limited to 4 primary partitions.
You are not allowed more than one extended partition.

So the unallocated space can be allocated as one partition = one user.

Your unusual partitioning scheme - as described - means that you are limited to a maximum of one user.

There is a reason for putting all users in /home as virtually everyone else does it!

Thank you yancek,

I don't understand what happened. During the earlier installations, the Gparted was pre-installed, as you said. However this time it was not so. So I had to install it.

Yes, I deleted it.

These are the outputs I got after entering those commands in the Terminal:-



Point taken.

Thank you for the link. I had gone through it once before. I checked it again.

Accordingly, with the help of Gparted, I can create the three partitions, i.e. the Swap, /data/user1 and the /data/user2. Here below I have given the snapshots of the Gparted UI. The first figure shows the status now before partition. The second figure just shows what I can do with help of Gparted. I have not applied those changes yet. I thought I should dicuss on it first before applying the changes. I have some difficulties too there, that I have discussed below.



I have problems in trying to do the partitions. In the figure-2 'After making the partitions' we can see that the partitions have been named as 'New partitions 3, 2, and 3'. They have not been given the names like /dev/sda7, dev/sda8 and /dev/sda9. I could not find the option in Gparted, to name them accordingly.

Moreover while creating the partitions in the Gparted, in the dialogue box 'Create a new partition' there is an empty box, marked as 'Label'. I could not comprehend what I should fill in there.

Another issue is, how do I give them the appropriate 'mount-points', if I am correct in saying that. In fact those partitions have to be data/user1 and data/user2. How do I do that?

And one more question that comes to my mind is, after creating these partitions, will they be automatically mounted and be available to their respective users for use without them, requiring the Root password?

Please kindly guide me through this.

Thanking you

Regards

Anil