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I'm a complete beginner so please bear with me.

My desktop has 500GB of SSD and 2TB of HDD - I want to dual boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu on it. I've installed Windows 10 so now I have ~260GB SSD and ~975GB HDD for Ubuntu. My RAM is 16 GB so I thought of using ~50GB for /, ~16GB for swap and the rest for /home (all on SSD).

I intend to use the HDD to store videos and whatnot. But I'm not sure which mount point I should choose for this free space:

Do I just create a mount point like /mnt? I was reading other threads about this but I wasn't sure if it should be left as free space during installation then mounted afterwards. I don't really understand 'mounting' to be honest.

  1. Set up your HDD to mount automatically on boot Easiest way to do this imo is through the gnome-disks GUI tool (to use it, just open a terminal - Ctrl+Alt+T, type in sudo gnome-disks and enter your password). Select your HDD, click on the cogwheels -> "Edit Mount Options...", enable "Mount at system startup" and choose a mount point (for example, /mnt/sda1 or whatever that device is identified as, or /media/user/DATA). https://askubuntu.com/a/1048871
muru
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5areductase
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    You already know your mount points: /, /home, and /swap. Map those locations to the appropriate partitions (sda1, etc) in the file /etc/fstab – user535733 Dec 18 '18 at 03:18
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    @user535733 You mean I just manually type out /etc/fstab? This is my first time using Linux so I'm not familiar with the file system – 5areductase Dec 18 '18 at 03:35
  • No. Look up how to use /etc/fstab. Honestly, were I in your shoes, I wouldn't muck about with extra partitions and mount points at all; those are intermediate-level stuff, and not easy for a beginner. The Ubuntu installer defaults are sane and safe for most new users - try them. Many new users try a bunch of different things in their first year, and some (repartition and) reinstall Ubuntu more than once. Don't paint yourself into a corner by chopping up your disk into a dozen partitions needlessly. – user535733 Dec 18 '18 at 03:48
  • See How to use manual partitioning during installation? When you install Ubuntu have both drives attached to the system, and during installation use advanced partitioning option to map mountpoints ( yes, they are exactly /, /home ) to appropriate drives. 18.04 comes with swap file by default, which would be in / so consider just using that if you have sufficiently large RAM. Changes will be written to /etc/fstab by the installer – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Dec 18 '18 at 05:05
  • Yeah I think I get what to do for the SSD portion. What I don't know is what I should do for the ~975GB of HDD portion as seen in the screenshot. – 5areductase Dec 18 '18 at 15:13

1 Answers1

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Easy:

  • / and swap on sda (your SSD)
  • /home on sdb (your HDD)

That way, your OS and the swap are on the SSD and your videos, documents, music are on the HDD.

Start with that until you know more and for the next install read this first

Fabby
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    Agree! Important to keep /home as separate thing. Makes it much easier to install new OS that can access old home. I also suggest putting /usr/local and /opt (if you use it) in partitions so you can easily use them if you decide to erase / and put in new OS. I've switched in new Ubuntu and Debian derivatives and had minimal trouble. – pauljohn32 Dec 19 '18 at 04:35