PART TWO of: creation of ext4 filesystem takes 20+ hours???

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

On Fri, 2022-10-28 at 07:14 +0200, Marco Fioretti wrote:
> a) delete the windows partition on /dev/sda and expand the ext4 one to
>    fill it, in order to use all of /dev/sda, 320 GB, as /home

well done.

> BUT, I have noticed that:
> 
> if I launch gparted when running in live mode, it says /dev/sda is
> 298.09 GB (not 320)

That's correct. At best SSD vendors are using estimated GB, They are
even free to use fantasy numbers that are neither GB nor GiB.

To convert GB to GiB you can use one of the calculators, such as
https://mtp.tools/converters/data-storage/gigabyte-to-gibibyte-calculator
to get an approximate value.

> , with one ext4 partition /dev/sda3, size 298.09 GB, used 1.94 GB, unused 296.15 GB.

Sounds reasonable, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ext4 .

> - I select /dev/sdb (the 64 GB drive called "C" above) for boot loader
>   installation
> 
> - I select /dev/sda3 to say that I want it to be /home, and notice
> that the installer says it is 320.1 GB, NOT 298.09 (size 320071 MB,
> used 6164)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

My age is mid 50's. I used to write Assembler code. The most useless
number system when writing Assembler code is the decimal system.
It doesn't make sense to distinguish between GB and GiB. The decimal
system should never be used for memory location and the count of space,
but it is what it is.

In a nutshell, don't care about the reported space, everything is ok.

> "No EFI system partition was found. This system will likely not be
> able to boot successfully, and the installation process may
> fail. Please go back and add an EFI system partition, or continue at
> your own risk"

I can't help with this. I'm not using an EFI partition, but my multi-
boot Linux machine boots successfully without any issue. The bootloader
on my machine isn't Grub2, it's Syslinux.

I installed Ubuntu on this machine a long time ago. I don't remember
what version I installed in the first place, but it was at least one
version before 16.04, if not several versions before 16.04, followed by
at least one or several do-release-upgrade, see

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man8/do-release-upgrade.8.html
.

I used the server image to install Ubuntu with an ncurses or ncurses
alike installer.

However, there's no issue with your SSD, it's intact and correctly
formatted.

The installer and/or you are making a mistake, but I don't know what
mistake/s.

Regards,
Ralf