Installation Partitioning Glitch Workaround

I ran into an installation problem concerning a partitioning scheme I was using, and thought I'd post the simple, manual hack I came up with to side-step the issue. Maybe this will help someone with a similar circumstance.

I was installing to a hard drive with a GUID Partition Table. Below is my initial approach, which may seem overkill, but I like to make sure I have plenty of free space first, and then adjust everything afterward based upon installation. Also, it's been many years since I've used Linux, so I didn't know what to expect as of late. The mount points are relative to a BSD-type setup.

# Mount Point | Device | File System Type | Size | Partition

/ sda5 ext4 1G Primary
none sda6 swap 4G Primary
/var sda7 ext4 1G Primary
/tmp sda8 ext4 1G Primary
/usr sda9 ext4 20G Primary
/home sda10 ext4 30G Primary

Basically, the problem was, the installation crapped at the end with a "[45] MdlMain.?.0" error. After a brief inspection, I realized that the '/' partition had run out of space. That occurred because the installer had only mounted '/' and '/home'. As a result, everything got unpacked into the '/' partition. Is a '/', 'swap', and '/home' the encouraged scheme, or did the installer get confused about the 6 primary partitions? I'm not sure, but here's how I tackled it:

# The following is based upon the scheme illustrated above.

1. Boot into the installation.

2. When you arrive at the partitioning screen, select "Help Me Resize My Partitions".

3. Using Gparted, create the '/', 'swap', '/var', '/tmp', '/usr', and '/home' partitions, but do not label them as such; size and format them only. We will label them in Step 5.

4. Apply the scheme, exit Gparted, and reboot.*

[ * There may be a method to make the installation immediately aware of the new partitions, but I didn't investigate it too deeply. I only know that, after proceeding with installation from that point, it didn't recognize them. ]

5. After rebooting and presented with the same partitioning screen, choose to install to existing partitions.

6. Select and label your partitions, but leave them as "not formatted". It is vital that you do not format them here, as all your work in the next few steps will be all for naught. Besides, they were all ready formatted in the previous boot.

7. Proceed with the installation until you are prompted with your "last chance" to abort before Vector Linux is installed. At that stage, hover your mouse over the bottom of the screen to unhide the Jwm task bar, and bring up an Xterm. From the command line, perform the following:

# ------------------------------------------------------------
# Workaround
# ------------------------------------------------------------

# (a) Mount the '/' partition

mount -t ext4 /dev/sda5 /mnt/target

# (b) Create the '/var', '/tmp', and '/usr' directories
# on your '/' partition.

mkdir /mnt/target/var
mkdir /mnt/target/tmp
mkdir /mnt/target/usr

# (c) Mount the '/var', '/tmp', and '/usr' partitions.

mount -t ext4 /dev/sda7 /mnt/target/var
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda8 /mnt/target/tmp
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda9 /mnt/target/usr

# ------------------------------------------------------------

8. Minimize the Xterm and proceed with the installation. At any time, you can return to your Xterm, and issue a 'df' command to verify that the proper partitions are being populated.

Hope this will be of use to someone...

~ dag ~