Can't get past partitioning

Question

When I've installed Arch before, I would use gparted and set the hard drive up without having to use any of the partitioning tools on the install iso. Evidently this is no longer an option, and from what I have found so far, the instructions for the various partitioning tools are, for me at least, pretty sketchy.  I tried running "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt" after using gparted, and bash said that it was unmountable, so I had to resort to the partitioning tools.
The example for cfdisk contains a line "Choose New -> 'Primary' and enter the desired size (15.44 GB in this example) for the root (/) filesystem. The partition will be put at the beginning of the drive. Select the Type and designate it as 83 Linux. The created / partition will appear as sda1. Thereafter select "Bootable" to flag root as bootable."
I can make it as far as typing the 15.44 in, but then there seems to be no way (and no information!) as to how to enter it into bash/cfdisk. There doesn't seem to be a way to say "OK, that's what I want." I can't get a way to input, and there never appears to be a way to "Select type" or designate it, etc.  There's probably an absurdly easy step missing (or that I'm missing!), but until I find out what the magic button is, I'm hosed. All I know is that it isn't "Enter," and it isn't "Tab."
I was able to thrash my way through parted, using the instructions at http://ebalaskas.gr/wiki/archlinux/parted, but I couldn't find a way to exit parted, so I used Ctrl/Alt/Del. After rebooting, I could mount /dev/sda1, but when I do mkdir /mnt/boot I get errors saying that it can't find ext4 file system, so I know I've gummed it up somehow. 
Google wasn't much help as far as using cfdisk goes, and I don't see anything that gives me a clear understanding of what I'm really doing when I tell parted what size and what partition I'm instructing it to create on my hard drive. If this is something I'm going to have to get used to, then some additional information is going to go a long way towards helping me make sense of this, and hopefully make my installation of Arch go a lot smoother and a lot quicker in the future.
Thanks.
Last edited by pottzie (2012-08-29 01:50:45)

Answer 1

pottzie wrote:When I've installed Arch before, I would use gparted and set the hard drive up without having to use any of the partitioning tools on the install iso. Evidently this is no longer an option
I don't know why you thought this. The Beginners' Guide says
Absolute beginners are encouraged to use a graphical partitioning tool. GParted is a good example, run from a "live" Linux distribution such as Parted Magic, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc. See Partitioning for some general tips and make sure to format the partitions with a filesystem (e.g. ext4, btrfs, etc) before rebooting.
The Beginners' Guide also contains links to more information on all the partitioning tools on the install media, including a detailed manual on cfdisk:  http://www.netadmintools.com/html/8cfdisk.man.html
And one for parted: http://linux.die.net/man/8/parted
Even if you didn't see those links, the man pages for both cfdisk and parted contain all the information you needed.
pottzie wrote:Google wasn't much help as far as using cfdisk goes,
That's strange; when I do a google search on using cfdisk, I get this: https://www.google.com/search?q=using+c … =firefox-a
There is plenty of information there, including another link to the online man page: http://ss64.com/bash/cfdisk.html
pottzie wrote:If this is something I'm going to have to get used to, then some additional information is going to go a long way towards helping me make sense of this, and hopefully make my installation of Arch go a lot smoother and a lot quicker in the future.
It's really all in the Beginners' Guide, or in a topic linked from there, or in the man pages for the tools.
Last edited by 2ManyDogs (2012-08-29 02:06:09)