hi are you familiar with LMDE 5? Because I installed it on my external hard drive but when I boot it up it does not recognise my other primary or bootable windows partition on the main computer which is on a different drive. but the other lines partition on that drive are not visible in devices. when I boot GRUB lists all the operating systems on both hard drives. I have my main drive inside the laptop witch has a Windows, Ubuntu and older linux mint and fedora. now my new external hard drive is meant to have LMDE 5 and MX Linux and DeepIn linux, but currently has only LMDE 5 only installed. But when I boot the system from my external hard drive with LMDE 5, both my windows partition on internal drive which is ntfs and my other ntfs partition on the external hard drive are missing. they are not visible or show in the list of devices. when I looked into my file system of my Lmde 5, I saw an ego folder and when I opened up the ego folder it contained all my stuff from the windows partition, which is all files folders and application. Do you have any idea what happened? each time I boot the lmde 5 it comes up with a which error message saying missing raid45.

how can I multiboot different linux distros and have and ntfs partition on an external hard drive of 1TB using the MBR method. and does the EFI always have to be the first partition? Because I want to install LMDE 5 and MX Linux and and possibly another distro and keep the remaining for an ntfs partition. This is all to be installed on an external hard drive. my laptop already has a multiple on the internal hard drive which has windows xp, fedora,Ubuntu and linux mint. already and they that runs smoothly. but the external hard drive partitioning and set-up is what I need to know. Because when I did it for my Lmde i could not see any of my ntfs partition showing in the devices or drives listed to even mount them. so i need to know why. I already explained the issue in another message above. Because the content of my ntfs on the internal are being displayed in the file system of the lmde 5 on the external hard drive inside the /boot/Efi folder. please advise. if I boot with my installation usb everything shows as normal in the list. but if I boot with the external hard drive this problem happens. The GRUB works fine and lists all the operating systems from both internal and external hard drives. I also did not have any efi or swap partition created on external hard drive with the multiboot.

Glad you think so! 🙂

facts, “average” cannot teach this well

Obliviously he is not, I think he meant us as average ones)

I don't think average here means the dull, untalented or unsophisticated user. It's rather a collective word used to indicate his use of Linux as common, as opposed to casual. An average Linux user is still very sophisticated and very talented when it comes to managing their Linux systems.

@@AverageLinuxUser hi I need your help. I installed linux mint deviants edition 5 on my external hdd but I cannot find my ntfs partition on the external and my main ntfs partition on the pc's internal hard drive when I boot with the lmde 5. but it shows me the other linux partitions I have on both internal and external hard drives in the devices section. I also went to the file system section of the lmde 5 I installed and I found an EFI folder which when I opened was showing the content of my internal window xp partition as folders within this same folder. but I cannot find all the ntfs partitions either external or internal to mount. but my lmde 5 is set to automount all devised or drives or partitions whichever you want to call it to list in devices. but not showing. Any help please? one thing I also noticed is I don't have any efi or swap partition created on my external hard drive partitions. but the grub is installed on the external hard drive.

Glad it was helpful!

@@AverageLinuxUser Which is the Best Linux distro for programming for beginners.

@@adithyan_hp I like the following: - Fedora (Red Hat) - used by large companies, so it is reliable, very good and useful to learn - EndeavourOS (Arch) - this is a most enjoyable Arch distro even for beginners - Solus (independent) - surpricingly good, quite enjoyable and quick to install, a special distro - Clear Linux (independent) - optimized for Intel hardware, a special distro - Oracle Linux (Red Hat) - optimized for Oracle software, a special distro - Linux Mint (Ubuntu) - most often recommented - Zorin OS (Ubuntu) - easy to use and quite nice - Elementary (Ubuntu) - easy to use and quite nice - Ubuntu Budgie (Ubuntu) - a really nice Ubuntu distro - UbuntuDDE (Ubuntu) - a really nice Ubuntu distro - Bunsenlabs Lithium (Debian) - makes you concentrate in programming instead of playing visuals

Maybe this will help kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qM-SfrZ0vZ6Zp2g.html

It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. And with the huge size of modern disks and SSD devices, reserving twice the RAM size for a swap partition isn't going to take much of a bite.

Glad it was helpful!

Gparted is fantastic. It saved me so many times: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qM-SfrZ0vZ6Zp2g.html

Thank you 👍

My question is very similar. What size do you recommend for root and home in my scenario? I have a Lenovo with 12 GB ram with a 250 GB Samsung SSD and 1 TB HDD. I run Linux Mint 20.1 with Windows 10 VM in Virtualbox. I started with a 15 GB root and it started to fill up after loading a couple of apps like Gimp, etc? I was able to expand a little bit by deleting and rebuilding swap space at end of hdd. Sounds like I should double root size to 30 or 40 GB.

Use ssd for root (/) and boot (/boot or /boot/efi) Partition and hdd for home (/home) partition

don't put your swap partition on the SSD if you can avoid it - increased SSD writes while swapping will reduce the life of your SSD. My current (laptop) setup is SSD only and isn't optimal. Ideally have more RAM than you use and don't have a swap partition or swap file!

@@treyquattro With 12 GB of RAM, it will swap very little, if at all. However, writing Swap to HDD will slow the system down to a crawl when writing to it. Bad idea.

​@@hb9145 I have 16GB physical RAM on my Linux machine and 40GB swap space. Yesterday I had 20GB swap in use. Swap is there to extend RAM virtually. All operating systems supporting virtual memory work the same way (Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, ...) The system will use as much as it requires. Saying "With 12 GB of RAM, it will swap very little" is very ill-informed, as is " writing Swap to HDD will slow the system down to a crawl when writing to it". All systems use virtual memory via swap file or partition. The only time a system will "slow ... to a crawl" is if thrashing is happening - because your swap space is insufficient. Makes me think you don't know what you're talking about.

19 GB swap?! You can create a swap as much as your ram, but if you got 8 GB ram or more, then 2 GB swap is enough. I use 2 GB swap space on my laptop (a laptop from 2005 with 1 GB ram). I didn't encounter any problems. When I check the swap usage, it doesn't even use all of it. You don't really need more than 1-2 GB swap these days. Telling people to create huge swap partitions is an ancient recommendation. Also, having too much swap is an issue. It's often better to have the memory-hogging process be killed right away when you run out of memory, rather than having the entire system slow to an unusable level when it starts spending all its time marshalling data in and out of swap.

@@ordinarryalien for hibernation saw in some post

@@ordinarryalien it depends on your RAM usage. I have 16GB RAM on a laptop and 40GB swap space (8GB partition + 32GB file) and I am currently using half the swap space for a total memory usage of 36GB. Figuring out this stuff ahead of time is one of the trickier aspects of installing Linux and why I ended up with insufficient swap partition: it was what was recommended when I first installed.

@@Uchiha_Madara1224 Oh, okay. That makes sense.

1. You can. But note that the first partitions are accessed faster. If you never use swap, efi-swap-root-home will not be wise. 2. yes, you can. For example, I used to have a data partition for huge files with XFS. Honestly, I did not see the difference from ext4 but it felt nice to be able to configure your system perfectly for my needs. Now, I just use ext4 for everything and do not bother 🙂 3. 1GB EFI is a lot. 100-300M is enough. No, you won't't be able to join than into one partion. The way to join two hard drives into /home, is to format your new 240GB drive as another partition. Add it to /etc/fstab to mount on the boot. Create some folders on it and symlink them to /home kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bNF0gaWT1czaiZs.html You may also need to change the permission of these folders to a regular user. 4. Yes, you can.

I am not an expert in this question. It depends on your hardware. GPT is part of the UEFI. You can install in legacy and msdos on older hardware, but all the newer hardware will require EFI installation with GTP.

I am not sure if it is true. But in old times when I used to dual-boot Linux and Windows, my linux did not work as well as when I installed Linux only. Probably, the complex partition setup with dual-boot causes some problems, while only linux install with /, /home, swap works much better.

But it will make life easier when you re-install. You only format and re-install / and do not touch /home with the data.

@@AverageLinuxUser Yes, if you reinstall more than once, it makes life easier. I just dist-upgrade Debian from one version to the next. My oldest install if from 2011.

fat32

@Gideon Pioneer yeah, that's what I did in fact -- no swap. thanks!

It depends. On my work computer, I have 32G RAM and 64G swap. This is because I run jobs on it that can consume an enormous amount of RAM. At home, I have 16G of RAM and I do not run heavy program. So, I just use 2G of swap file. Also, I only put my computer to sleep and never hibernate. If you want to Hibernate (what I do not recommend because it often doesn't work correctly), then you need 32G swap or more. If you are not sure, create a swap file of a few Gb kzfaq.info/get/bejne/otKSf5motMnKn30.html If you see that it is not enough, delete that swap file and create a new larger one.

One of the way is to change Boot Option from your bios into the linux os.. Linux usually give you an option to which boot you want. Choose the "Windows Manager" (I forgot but i think its the most bottom) for booting the windows os.

You're welcome!