Partitions

Partitioning the Disk

Device Identification

To identify available disks, the fdisk -l command will give you all the necessary information, but lsblk can also be used. My favorite flags are lsblk -o NAME,SIZE for a concise output and lsblk --fs when I need to check file system information.

Optimal Logical Sector Size (exclusive for NVMe devices)

To check the formatted logical block address (LBA) size of your NVMe drive:

nvme id-ns -H /dev/nvme0n1 | grep "Relative Performance"

LBA Format  0 : Metadata Size: 0   bytes - Data Size: 512 bytes - Relative Performance: 0x2 Good (in use)
LBA Format  1 : Metadata Size: 0   bytes - Data Size: 4096 bytes - Relative Performance: 0x1 Better

You can confirm it by running lsblk -td and looking at the LOG-SEC column value.

Note: On the example above the sector size in use (512 bytes) is not the optimal one.

To change the logical block address size, you can use the nvme format command specifying the preferred value with the --lbaf parameter:

nvme format --lbaf=1 /dev/nvme0n1

Partition Tables

To write the partition tables using cfdisk:

cfdisk /dev/the_disk_to_be_partitioned

Example Layout:

To verify the partitions using fdisk:

fdisk -l /dev/partitioned_disk

Formatting Partitions

To create an Ext4 file system for the root:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/root_partition

To initialize the swap partition:

mkswap /dev/swap_partition

To format the EFI partition:

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/efi_system_partition

Filesystem Label

Now is a good time to add a label to the efi partition. This will be useful later to set the rEFInd configuration. Using dosfslabel:

dosfslabel /dev/efi_system_partition ARCHIE

You can verify it using lsblk:

lsblk -o NAME,LABEL

Mounting the File Systems

Mount the root volume to /mnt:

mount /dev/root_partition /mnt

Mount the EFI partition:

mount --mkdir /dev/efi_system_partition /mnt/efi

Enable the swap volume:

swapon /dev/swap_partition