Retired Techie
Getting older, not necessarily wiser!
Fedora Install Again – Successes After to Many Failures to Count
Published on October 20, 2022 at 6:28 pm by LEWIntroduction
It finally happened, I finally did a successful install of Fedora, after years of failures. What did I do differently? I let Fedora setup my storage drive. Apparently all these years it has not liked how I setup my storage drive.
After taking a look at how Fedora partitioned my storage drive, I think I am gleaning some understanding of the issues I have experienced over the years. And this above all the failures does more to convince me that Fedora is still the Windows of the Linux world. They want you to do things there way!
My Initial Storage Drive Setup that Consistently Failed
I have a rather standard drive setup when installing Linux on this particular computer. And it does work on pretty much any Linux distribution, with the exception of Fedora (imagine that).
sda1 EFI 512 MB FAT32 sda2 root (/) 50 GB EXT4 sda3 /home 175 GB EXT4 sda4 swap 8 GB
Nothing weird or fancy here. This has worked perfectly with all the Debian (Ubuntu) and Arch based distributions I have tried. But it has never worked with any Fedora distribution.
How Fedora Does it
Out of both frustration and curiosity, I totally wiped the storage drive, and let the fedora installer setup the partitions. What I found was interesting. Fedora setup the following.
sda1 EFI 629 MB FAT32 sda2 /boot 1.1 GB EXT4 sda3 file root? 270 GB BTRFS
Things to Research
This gives me several things to research about what Fedora expects for a partition scheme. Especially since there is no information provided by the installer (at least that I could see) when doing manual partitioning.
I am now fairly certain that there is something in my preferred partitioning scheme that Fedora does not like, even though it is perfectly legitimate. Brings me back to Fedora being the Windows of Linux.
I did some initial checking of what was on the various partitions. And this only adds to my confusion. Let me give you a couple of examples that I need to do more research on.
In the 629 MB EFI partition that Fedora created, less than 1% was actually used. Makes me wonder why it would not use the 512 MB partition (would of still been less than 1% usage).
Why is there a separate boot partition? Is this a requirement for Fedora? I understand the logic behind it, but if it is a requirement, it should so be stated in the manual partition section.
Also is BTRFS required of the root partition? And why in the disk manager was it “boot partition” instead of “/”? After all the boot partition was “/boot”.
Also if a separate “/boot” partition was created, it would seem logical that the “/home” partition would have been separated out also?
Conclusion
I have my work cut out for me today researching Fedora partitioning, and if there are any hard and fast requirements. Not sure what I will find. But one thing that became obvious to me this morning is apparently Fedora will load on a different partition scheme than the one I use with all other Linux Distros.
Should be interesting.
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