Advice on Partition Scheme for small netbook SSD

Support & Help Requests
,
#1

Attempting a clean install of 16.10 on my Dell Mini 9’s 8GB SSD, yields an error that the disk is too small (8.6GB required).

I believe can get around this by leaving an SD card permanently in the reader and spreading some of the installation onto it via the “something else” partitioning option.

What I don’t know is which parts of the installation would work well on the SD, and which should remain on the SSD. I assume Home would be a good candidate for the SD, but beyond that I’m unsure. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Great thanks to Wimpy and the Ubuntu Mate team. After 13 years of distro hopping, I’ve found a real go-to favorite!

#2

Well, 2 options for you:

1- I’m putting swap on the SSD because I’m not really sure what will you use the system for, so you may not have enough space for /.

1.1-

SSD
/boot
/swap

SD Card
/

1.2.-
SSD
/boot
/swap

SD Card
/
/home

2- In case 8GB would be enough for / on your needs.
2.1-
SSD
/boot
/

SD Card
/home
/swap

2.2-
SSD
/

SD Card
/boot
/home
/swap

4 Likes
#3

Thanks malwaredpc! I tried option your recommendation 2.1, and it worked great. The install used about 65% of the SSG with just under 3GB remaining for the programs I installed from the boutique. Everything fits!

1 Like
#4

Great!! Just in case anyone else or you needs more space there, /var could be located in the SD card too.

1 Like
#5

It’s impressive the installation succeeded with such a small target for root.
Can you possibly post the output of the commands:

lsblk
df -h

from a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) ?

#6

I’d been installing to the 8GB SSD alone, up through 16.04 with no space issues. I suppose the more robust GTK3 support takes up a bit more room?

lsblk:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 7.2G 0 disk └─sda1 8:1 0 7.2G 0 part / mmcblk0 179:0 0 14.9G 0 disk ├─mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 1K 0 part ├─mmcblk0p5 179:5 0 3.8G 0 part [SWAP] └─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 11.1G 0 part /home
df -h:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 983M 0 983M 0% /dev tmpfs 201M 6.4M 195M 4% /run /dev/sda1 7.0G 4.7G 2.0G 72% / tmpfs 1002M 18M 984M 2% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock tmpfs 1002M 0 1002M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/mmcblk0p1 11G 79M 11G 1% /home tmpfs 201M 28K 201M 1% /run/user/1000

1 Like