How to use Manual Partitions | GPT vs MBR Disk Partition Structure

have you ever wondered what that option is during the install process that says manual partitioning and sometimes you just want to modify what uses what on your actual disk well in this video we're going over all manual partitioning whether or not you're using GPT your UEFI or legacy all these things I'm going to kind of try and explain and go through a lot of samples so you can see real time what I'm doing so you can emulate this exact same thing so next time you do an install you can do manual partitioning and set these up so first off we have the boot process so when you go to install you will typically be either UEFI or legacy these are the two options you have to boot from on a drive now I've done an extended video series over UEFI and legacy if you want to check that out you can link will be in the description but for this video I want to just go ahead and say hey depending on what you're using and if your dual booting you definitely need to stick to the same type of install meaning when you go to install your operating system you need to do UEFI for Windows and if you have Linux on there it also needs to be UEFI you can't have differing versions otherwise your dual boot process it's just kind of a nightmare because you have to select each disk and it just gets really complex there's no need for that so if you're doing you if I do it across the board for all the operating systems installed on that system or if you're doing legacy make sure everything is installed doing legacy so let's get over the desktop I'm gonna show you the differences on the BIOS select screen between installing legacy in installing UEFI because this computer installs both as most computers these days operate and actually can install both UEFI and legacy so let's go ahead and give you an example okay so let's determine we'll go to a boot menu from our BIOS here so we'll pull this up and here is where you really select when you go to install your operating system here is really what determines if it's legacy install or if it's UEFI if you boot just USB flash drive this is let's say a Windows install or if the Linux install and you select just USB without any UEFI in front of it that's gonna be a legacy install by default the installer is driven by your selection here now if I come down here and say UEFI and I go and install the operating system that's on this flash drive well that operating system will be UEFI based so that's the differences so some people get confused because sometimes they only have one option let's say you disabled UEFI in your BIOS or it just isn't showing that actual installation media means will always install legacy most option most times you get the option but some other times you have legacy disabled and it only boots to UEFI installs this means you'd only have the option for UEFI so good to know most instances where you don't get the option between legacy and UEFI it's a BIOS setting you need a change and everybody BIOS is different so with this let's go ahead and boot using UEFI so if we actually install through this again this would be a UEFI installation so next up on this screen we're gonna go ahead and go over GPT and MBR now MBR sometimes referred to dos and this is the partition scheme think of it as like a master record of all of the actual partitions on that drive so when you carve up your drive this is like the index so sometimes the the newer versions called GPT and this partition table puts a record at the beginning and also at the end now when you create a partition you have to create a very specialized partition to utilize this so it works differently than in the now on MBR you don't need that special partition and it only has one at the very beginning of the drive so what this means for you is you don't need that special boot partition on an MBR partition scheme now you're still kind of following me here well let's go ahead and show you the differences in the actual disk so if you're unsure what you have you can do F disk from your command line or you could also just go into gparted like I'm showing in this example and you can see what type of disk this is now when it's GPT it's really important to note that these are controlled by collective partitions where when it comes to the bootable Drive so this is kind of confusing but when it comes to MBR there's actual flags on partitions GPD doesn't have flags MBR and dos-based partition schemes do have flags so what you do you can make one partition on a legacy MBR type system and then just mark it bootable it will always just boot to that so that's pretty slick and that's how some Linux installs you'll see you know a lot of stuff online where they only create one partition well they're just booting in using an MBR based partition system and then marking that one partition bootable and putting everything into it so that's pretty awesome however when you got GPT you need to do like a boot partition and it's a little more complex because you don't have that flagging system however GPT is a lot better because it supports higher-end drive so if you have bigger than 2 terabytes you need to have a GPT Drive and this is where people kind of get lost so let's go ahead and jump over the desktop show you gparted and i'm going to show you the actual partition scheme on this one and kind of overload those differences and show you examples so we're presented with this we're going to go ahead and do gparted live all right we're not going to touch the key map and we're just gonna hit enter because it defaults to 33 use English we're gonna continue to start X and gparted automatically you wouldn't need any of these other options unless it didn't show on your screen or and gave you a black screen okay so this starts up our gparted automatically so the first thing I like to do is just look at what our partitions are I can tell already we have a boot partition right here this says fat32 but this is probably flagged as efi if we actually looked at its description so let's see what this is I'm gonna say this is a GPT disk but I always like to make sure by going device information sure enough partition table on this one is GPT as you see we have our boot partition we have our swap and we have our main partition which has both root and home some Linux installs break out root and home but this is the basic structure so boot partition for GPT is absolutely needed we have our swap because I think this one only has like 8 Meg's of memory or 8 gigs of memory I should say and then we also have all the rest of the drives allocated for route and home in this one and this is actually using better FS where some other people usually do ext4 is typically what most people select I wanted to go a little different only on this one that's why I select it so this is the basic partition scheme of a GPT disk now if this was MBR and they said MBR or Das over here that is both MBR and Das again is about the same partition table structure just some programs call it one and others call it another so let's say it's not GPT you could have literally just one partition let's say it's ext4 and then you could literally have the flag's boot and that's it and you could put everything in there your - boot directory would be in there everything could be in there and then if you wanted probably a swap file would be good for something with low memory like this one with only 8 gigs so that is the basis of this you know that's the differences between the structure and GPT and the structure here so with that let's go ahead and boot into our Linux install and I'm going to show you how all three of these are mounted in what's called fstab in Linux this actually kind of shows you how the directory structure is laid out so you can actually look at what happens with my boot partition how that is actually labeled and mounted and then you can see the swap partition and then see finally where our root and home kind of reside ok so from here let's go ahead and launch into terminal and we're gonna just look at our fstab fstab is always in the e.t.c directory and just simply fstab so we're gonna just do a cat which just goes ahead and prints out all of that stab right here in the terminal so go fullscreen with it and then just do et Cie fstab so from here let's go ahead and look at what each one of these is instead of using the dev it actually uses UUID this is the actual identifier of that partition so I always recommend whenever doing manual edits enough step using the UEFI or UUID now this is the hump the root directory it's using the better FS and then you have all the options on this so these options are a little excessive if you're not sure what to put here I always recommend just doing defaults and then space 0 0 usually this is good the only time you would change this is usually for a root partition and other things but I think this gives it like extra priority I usually like I said if you're curious and you're adding partitions in fstab usually 0 0 it's never steered me wrong but with that this is how the identifier of the drive in fstab this is where it's mounted at this is the filesystem it's going to these are the options and then we have 0 0 here at the end and I don't want to confuse you by explaining that so with this portion we're done and then we have the fat32 portion which was in the one if you looked on the other screen this was the fat32 boot partition which is efi so this one we have the UUID to identify it but this is SDA one which we saw in gparted it's to forge slash boot so it's mounting this to ford slash boot in our file system it's a fat32 or v fat directory style it has all these options now most times I don't have any of these options for efi partition this seems a bit excessive I guess whenever I installed this it just kind of default at all this which is fine I guess but you probably don't need it much of this as far as the options and then finally we have our swap partition this isn't actually mounted anywhere on the drive a swap partition is exactly that a swap partition so you'd put the UUID none and then swap so this isn't mounted but you use it as swap space defaults 0 0 so if you're unsure of the UUID you can do BL k ID or sudo BL k ID and then I'll show you what you have so it'll say hey this is your boot partition which is fat you have your swap partition which is right here and then you have your actual better FS system which is right here and these all match up so if you look here to this UUID it'll go ahead and match right here the V fat will match right here to this UUID and that's how you you'd find your UID to put in your fstab and then finally one other thing I'd show if you're still kind of getting a little lost or an unsure what partitions what in Linux I like to do DF disk free - H for human readable this kind of breaks down where your stuff is so you can see the I device identifier SDA for which we can match that to right here is our root partition it's currently used 47 gigs out of 220 or 218 gigs and then if we go to boot you can see this right here is da one right here and that's mounted to boot and then swap isn't listed in discs free because it's a swap partition everything's always used all the time if it needs swap it just goes ahead and use whatever swap is there but it's not actually mounted so it wouldn't show on this screen these are the basis screens for actually maintaining our partitions and Linux and then just kind of manually partitioning and just so you have a better understanding of a lot of the options because it's so easy to get lost in just technical explanations that's why I wanted to show real-world examples so with that you have these bases now if you look at the examples you can kind of see it on Linux based systems if it's a legacy or a MBR based drive you can have one partition you can flag it as bootable and then you can put everything in the root so you can have your home you can have your dash boots you can have the root all within the same partition and then on top of that you might create like a swap partition just so you can have some swap going on in that drive for performance reasons on systems with not very much memory like eight gigs unless you probably should have a swap partition just as an example so with this a regular boot partition on MBR you don't really need the boot partition usually if it's an MBR dot based partition scheme you just have that one partition if you really want to be simplistic about it and mark that partition ooh so with that you also have GPT setups now GPT setups require the very first partition to be a GPT basically a boot partition it'll say EFI boot partition is so it's actual type of partition that has to be efi and this will basically allow it to the boot now I've kind of mixed up some of the terminology when I say UEFI and I say GPT a lot of times those are together almost every single time you do this there is some mix and match you can do but it gets really complex and for this video if you're watching as a beginner I would just say hey if you're using UEFI you probably should be using GPT or you can do legacy but if you're doing a legacy boot just know that you should probably use the the MBR base structure because GPT gets really confusing really quick when you get the legacy and it doesn't work all that well a lot of times so when you're doing a legacy boot I like to stick to just MBR das base schemes you can do GPT but it gets a little dicey so just as a general rule of thumb I like to just say hey if I'm boot UEFI I typically go GPT partition scheme and if I boot legacy typically I'll go MBR das base partition scheme this makes things kind of be easy for me and you know if you don't go out there and do you find it's I would recommend GPT just because they synergize so well with each other you can mix and match and kind of break this rule for sure it just isn't advised and you can have some let's just say quirky things happen that I can't really go into in this video because everybody systems a little differently but for this example let's just go ahead and say that so when it comes to the GPT you have all of those partitions like gone over and when it comes to MBR you just have a lot of times one partition and that partition is marked or flagged bootable remember the flags are only for MBR and legacy partitions where GPT does not work on flags a lot of times the actual partition determines where that actual bootable is and when you have that bootable partition you got to make sure in Linux that you're mounting in to basically /boot that way that partition basically knows that hey this is where it will boot from super important but I want to just go ahead and lay out these examples so you know how to mainly partition your drives but with all that said let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below and a big shout out to my patrons without you I couldn't make videos like this one and I'll see you in the next

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 26,104

Keywords: chris titus tech, how to install ubuntu with partitions, partition, how to create partition, how to use gparted windows, how to install ubuntu, how to install kali linux with partitions, how to use gparted, how to use gparted live, how to do prtition, how to use gparted live cd, how to create disk partition on mac, howto, how to partition a hard drive, manual, manual partition

Id: aGRQsONv0vA

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 11 2019