Installing Clear Linux using second disk as a separate home partition

General Discussion
1

Hi,

I’ve encountered a problem when I’m installing Clear Linux 41230. I’m trying to install on a laptop with two SSDs where I want to use first SSD for the boot and root partitions and use the second SSD as a separate home partition. To that end during the install process I named the boot partition on the first SSD as CLR_BOOT, the root partition as CLR_ROOT and the home partition on the second SSD as CLR_MNT_/home. I then created a user called “admin”. The section of the installation where the disks are normally selected indicated that the correct mount points were going to be used.

I completed the installation and rebooted the laptop. However, when I logged in as “admin” and opened the file manager under GNOME it complained that it couldn’t find the directory /home/admin. In addition, when I opened.a terminal it also complained about not being able to find the /home/admin directory. Further investigation revealed that the home partition wasn’t available under /home and that the boot and root partitions were in fact located on the second SSD.

As a test I installed Clear Linux on two machines, each with a single SSD. On each machine I set up separate root and home partitions. On these occasions everything was perfect. Each partition was mounted at the proper mount point and the GNOME file manager and terminal functioned without any problems.

My question is this - why does Clear Linux have problems where the home partition is on a separate disk but not where it’s on the same disk as the boot and root partitions?

2

I don’t think CL allows the home partition on a separate disk during install.

You can set up the home partition on the same disk as the boot and root partitions during the install, and then mount home on the second ssd after installation.

3

Thanks for the reply! Maybe that this is something that the devs can look into? In the meantime I was able to get around the problem by creating an /etc/fstab file and then using the GNOME disks utility to edit the mount points. However, this is not an ideal solution.

As it happens the laptop’s BIOS allows for the disks to be set up as either RAID 0 or RAID 1 so that would be a solution.

It just doesn’t make sense that every other distribution that I’ve run on.the laptop allows the use of a separate disk as a home partition and Clear Linux doesn’t.

4

Would it help if you set the partition type to “Linux Home Partition” ?

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5

Reading this post reminded me of how I have my system setup. I have the “root” boot “/” partition
on an nvmem device and my home directory on a mechanical SATA drive. Yes this is done via a
modified /etc/fstab file. This works fine.

PATH MODEL FSUSED FSAVAIL FSTYPE FSVER TRAN LABEL PARTLABEL MOUNTPOINT
/dev/sda WDC WD221KFGX-68B9KN0 sata
/dev/sda1 632.2G 4T ext4 1.0 usrHomeDta /home
/dev/sda2 134.2G 14.1T ext4 1.0 shareDta shareDta /mnt/dataVol
/dev/nvme0n1 WD Blue SN570 1TB nvme
/dev/nvme0n1p1 vfat FAT32 nvme boot EFI
/dev/nvme0n1p2 37.6G 831.5G ext4 1.0 nvme root / /

6

Hi! You can do it. I have CL installed on 4 different NVMes and they all are encrypted. CL uses Systemd and not Fstab.

7

Hi all,

Thanks for the replies. However, I’ve decided to use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed on the laptop in question. It seems to work better for what I want to do, in particular when it comes to running Citrix Workspace, and it’s also a rolling release distribution. It also allows me to set up a second disk as a separate home partition without any issues.