Mageia forum

Hello all, first time here. I installed Mageia last night and apparently messed up the installation by choosing the second option of erasing the drive and using the whole drive for installation, and Extended (thought of that as a good thing from my Mac days), because when I looked at the HD, it only says it is using about 50G of a 1 TB drive. How can I reformat the drive correctly? So far liking Mageia, so I hope to be able to rectify this. Thank you for your consideration and any help offered.

According to your screenshot all of the drive is used for partitions already. Can you please post the output of

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lsblk

Thanks for the reply, here's the output:

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NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0  50.3G  0 part /
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part
├─sda5   8:5    0     4G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sda6   8:6    0 877.2G  0 part /home
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

And here is what I see in Files:

The output means that you have a 50GB / filesystem and a 877GB /home filesystem, so the whole disk is already in use. Isn't that what you wanted ?

I am just not used to not seeing the full availability for the hard drive. So I will be able to access whatever I download onto my hard drive through the home folders (Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc)? But does that mean my programs and the memory that they take is going on the 53G partition? I am just not understanding why it was partitioned this way, and what possible constraints I am working with.

Okay, I am researching the 'swap' partition, and am finding this Ubuntu forum somewhat helpful and clarifying:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1234838 ... s-in-20-04

I just want to make sure I have enough room to store what I need to, and that everything is going to work alright. I don't want to start putting anything on it yet until I find out whether or not I need to do a reinstall or if I screwed up my HD. Just seems like a lot of extra partitioning. I have also been seeing references to whether the system is UEFI or BIOS (I have BIOS), and that doing the wrong kind of install could have damaging repercussions, depending on the system and the type of install/partitioning. If I can do a reinstall to rectify things, that would be great. If anyone still has any clarifying insights (like how I can get it to show the availability of my larger partition, and if just doing a reinstall will fix this) I welcome them, thank you.

Hi skeye94 and welcome to Mageia.

skeye94 wrote:I just want to make sure I have enough room to store what I need to, and that everything is going to work alright. I don't want to start putting anything on it yet until I find out whether or not I need to do a reinstall or if I screwed up my HD. Just seems like a lot of extra partitioning. I have also been seeing references to whether the system is UEFI or BIOS (I have BIOS), and that doing the wrong kind of install could have damaging repercussions, depending on the system and the type of install/partitioning. If I can do a reinstall to rectify things, that would be great. If anyone still has any clarifying insights (like how I can get it to show the availability of my larger partition, and if just doing a reinstall will fix this) I welcome them, thank you.

1/ UEFI or BIOS install.
This is controlled by the boot method of your computer. It is very difficult to install Mageia in the wrong mode if you followed the installer prompts. Since you accepted the installer option to erase everthing and auto-create the partitions, it generally creates a reliable outcome for users. If you change your boot mode to UEFI, then usually a re-install would be required and an extra partition is required (/EFI). The installer would normally auto-created this, and there is a prompt if it is not able to.
If you are into games / steam and IDEs then you *may* have to increase the size of your / partition. In saying that, you have already an up and running system, and you have used ~10GB of the partition capacity.

2/ *(like how I can get it to show the availability of my larger partition*.
This is a function of the file manager. If you are using *Files*, this implies Gnome DE.
Open *Files*, click on *Home*, then right click on unused space in the window( not on an icon). this will display the available capacity of the /home partition
.

heres a screengrab of *pcmanFM*, one of many File Managers available in linux.
it displays, as default, the partition free capacity and total partition capacity.(bottom right of image)

fortunately, you can just add the file manager that suits your needs, and make it the default for file management.

As you can see, my /home partition is pretty full, but I use other partitions in my system for video, music and CAD. I also multi-boot, so have 22 partitions, including 2 single ~100GB.

Okay, thanks benmc and doktor5000, this helps alleviate my concerns. I have started loading files on and using disks to monitor what was going where, and all seems to be going well. It just weirded me out at first when I went to 'Other Locations' to see what was available on 'My Computer' and all it showed was the 53G partition. So far I am liking Mageia, finding my way around it easy enough, taking a little more looking to get familiar with it all, but it is relatively similar to Zorin, which I have been using for the last 8 years. Hoping to find a few more ways to tweak it, like changing the colors for the folder icons and windows, but even if that is not possible, I like it well enough. We'll see how it handles when I fill it up and use it more. Over the last year or so I had been repeatedly getting more errors and slowing down of the computer with Zorin, needed to spend more and more time trying to figure out and fix problems. Once again, thanks!

Please don't forget to mark the thread as solved, by editing the subject of the first post and prefix it with [SOLVED], thanks in advance.

Just want to jump in and say that was a huge effort, admired, benmc