reinstalling on SSD, adding /home (and swap???) later, was: Safest way to resize windows partition before installing

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2020 at 21:20, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
>
> if this makes sense (please tell if it doesn't),

IMHO, no.

Points:
 • The T430 has a slot for an mSATA SSD; you don't need to waste your
time fooling around with mounting the HD into the optical drive bay.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T430
 • Have *both* SSD & HD disks fitted when you install. Don't fool
around trying to add swap later.
 • 4 GB of RAM is not enough these days. Fit at least 8 GB. DDR3 is
old now -- I was given 3-4 DIMMs of it for free last month by a
friend, in order to upgrade my girlfriend's 2010 MacBook Pro. A used
4GB DIMM should not cost you more than €10-€20 at most. DIMMs do not
wear out; if it works, it will keep working indefinitely.
• Put swap on the HD, not the SSD. The OS should rarely need swap so
it does not need to be on a super-fast disk.

Here is how to partition and configure it. This is based on what I
used have in my own X220. (Later I replaced its HD with an SSD, so now
it has 2 SSDs.)

e.g.
/dev/sda: 320 GB SATA HD
/dev/sdb: 64 GB mSATA SSD

sda1, sda2, sda3: EFI boot partition, Windows C drive, Windows recovery drive
sda4: extended partition, containing:
  sda5 - Windows data volume
  sda6 - Linux swap

sdb1: 32 GB Linux root
sdb2: 32 GB Linux /home

I mount the Windows C drive to /dos and the Windows D (data) drive to
/windows from /etc/fstab during boot. There is an option during
installation to edit the mount points for these partitions, and these
2 mount points (/dos and /windows) are built-in options. This fixes
all permissions errors for you and makes things work automagically, so
long as you disable Windows fast boot.

In Windows, I move my home directory subfolders (Documents, Downloads
etc.) to D:. I am the only user so no need for subfolders.

In Linux, in my home directory (/home/lproven) I remove the built-in
folders for ~/Documents, ~/Downloads etc. I replace these with
symlinks to the matching folders on my Windows data drive.

So, I have access to all the same files and documents from both OSes
-- but all my Linux config files stay in my Linux home directory. With
this method, I can triple-boot 2+ distros and have the same files in
all of them, without duplication or sync.

-- 
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