While installing Linux...

Last night, I was installing Ubuntu Mate in a machine which already had Ubuntu installed in it. But this version was installed in LVM logical volumes. I still have to learn LVM but that is for another day. The issue that I was facing was that I could not delete those partition during installation. After some hopeless searching, I decided to use fdisk to delete them, and it worked!

This is how I did it

Deleting a partition before installing Linux

1. Open the terminal

2. To list out all the disks, enter

   sudo fdisk -l | grep '^Disk'

3. Identify your hard disk from the list. Say it’s /dev/sda

4. To format the disk, enter

   fdisk /dev/sda

5. You will be asked for an option. Press m for help. Press d to delete a partition

6. If your disk has multiple partitions, a partition number will be asked (There were multiple LVM logical volumes). Repeat the process multiple times till there are no more partitions. You can create partitions while installing Linux

Note

While deleting partitions, make sure not to delete any attached USB drives (which usually is the Linux installation media)

Deciding partition size

• boot - 1 GB is more than enough. 512 MB is best
• swap - There is a lot of discussion regarding swap size. It would be good if you read about what it is. Refer the table for the correct size. I have 8 GB RAM, so I use 8 GB swap
• root - A standard commercial installation takes 7-8 GB. So I give it an extra 20 GB space for all tools (total of 30 GB), which should last me 5 years. Linux tools anyway take very space.
• home - Rest of the hard disk :)