Preserving Disk Partitions During Lithium Install

rickster1006 · 2020-08-13 16:04:22

Hello. I’m planning to do a fresh install of Lithium to my ancient HP Pavilion laptop, which currently runs terrific on Helium. The laptop has two physical disks, & as a result, I’ve created customized disk partitions (ie. SWAP, /HOME, /TMP, & /VAR) across the 2 disks (non-LVM or RAID), thinking it improves a bit on disk I/O. I previously tried Fedora (LXDE) with an encrypted LVM partition using both disks on this laptop & startup time went from seconds to minutes. So, I installed Helium & things have been snappy since then. Other than my Keepass database, there is no data I care about on this laptop, & plan to re-format With EXT4. Given this, is it possible to use my existing disk layout, or will I have to recreate all the partitions & mount points from scratch again?
Thanks in advance,
-Rick

rbh · 2020-08-13 16:49:08

rickster1006 wrote:

is it possible to use my existing disk layout, or will I have to recreate all the partitions & mount points from scratch again?

Yes! You can keep al existing partitions. Just choose formating.
Just now, I do not remember if you have to choose expert or standard alternative.
I think its allways better to chose ecxpert, give better control...

johnraff · 2020-08-14 01:12:02

If you've got enough free space, I would suggest making a new partition for Lithium and installing there. You might be able use the existing home partition with the "keep existing data" option (I haven't tried this) or possibly create a new one and migrate the existing data over later. (My own policy is to have a "data" partition for non-distro-specific stuff that all installs can share, but let them keep individual /home directories for config on their own partitions.)

BTW not everyone recommends using separate partitions for root directories like /tmp or especially /var. You never know how the data will grow, and can end up with wasted free space in one partition or another.

Debian Installer's expert install does give you a lot more control, but even the standard install allows you to set up partitioning, formatting and even LVM or encryption by hand.

SSDs are quite cheap now (I just last week bought a 500GB Samsung for ~$70 US), so if your laptop has the appropriate SATA sockets, you might consider taking this chance to swap out one of your hard drives. The increase in speed might be worth the effort, and depending on what you've got now you might get a boost in disk space too.

rickster1006 · 2020-08-16 14:29:19

Thank you both for the Lithium install recommendations. I tried both the standard & expert GUI setup, & both options recognized the existing partitions. Unfortunately, I still needed to provide the mount points. Regardless, the install was quick & the laptop still seems snappy running Lithium. I am happy!
As for installing an SSS, the laptop is so old it only supports PATA/EIDE. Trying to find a hybrid-like, or SSD was impossible. I’ve seen EIDE to SATA adapter, but given this is for a laptop, I didn’t want to fiddle with squeezing drives into a tight space. That said, on a whim I did another search on Amazon today & noticed they have in stock Kingspec 2.5 inch PATA SSD drives. I’ve never heard of this company. The reviews are mixed, & it seems like the drives aren’t always recognized (or bootable) but for $60 it seems like an interesting research topic. I like the idea of breathing some new like into this 13 year old laptop!

rbh · 2020-08-19 11:43:13

rickster1006 wrote:

I tried both the standard & expert GUI setup, & both options recognized the existing partitions. Unfortunately, I still needed to provide the mount points.

There is no program that could guess how you want to use partitions.

#1 2020-08-13 16:04:22

Preserving Disk Partitions During Lithium Install

#2 2020-08-13 16:49:08

Re: Preserving Disk Partitions During Lithium Install

#3 2020-08-14 01:12:02

Re: Preserving Disk Partitions During Lithium Install

#4 2020-08-16 14:29:19

Re: Preserving Disk Partitions During Lithium Install

#5 2020-08-19 11:43:13

Re: Preserving Disk Partitions During Lithium Install

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