Mageia forum

Hey everyone,

I just switched to Mageia from Ubuntu 10.04. It's running great so far and I'm quite content with it. However, after installing Mageia from the live CD to my hard drive I noticed that my file system only has 9GB available while my home folder has the remaining 680GB. Is this normal? I set up the partitioning so that Mageia had about 689GB and then the swap had whatever was left over.

Thanks for reading.

If you let the automatic partitioning do it's work, then you should have gotten something like a 15GB root partition,
a /swap partition with 1,5 the size of your RAM, and the /home partition would get all the rest of the available space.

During installation it offers the choice of reusing the existing partitions, automatic partitions, or custom partitions.

If automatic is selected it will make a root partition large enough for an average desktop and leave the remainder as /home. There is no point having the root partition too large you would never be able to use the space.
My root partition is 12 GB and I have quite a lot of applications installed.

The command 'df' in a console will show you how much space you have left.


If you think the root partition is too small your choices are :-
Reinstall using custom partitioning. That way you can keep your existing /home with all its files, but resize it to free up space.

Resize your existing partitions. There are two ways to do this. One is to log in using a LiveCD resize the partitions and then rewrite the fstab file and grub menu to reflect the changes.
The other is to log in as root in your existing system, resize the home partition and use the space freed up to create new partitions such as /var or /usr/share. The partitioning tool in Mageia Control Centre is smart enough to move all files in those folders to the new partitions for you. (You cannot do this while logged in as a regular user because your /home cannot be resized while it is being used)

Which you do depends on how comfortable you feel about being able to recover if it goes wrong.

Thanks everyone. I think I'll just leave it for now, as I did allow it do automatically partition my hard drive. The only thing I really do is browse the web and practice programming when I feel like it . Thank you all for the help; I really appreciate it.