Hello there!!
This is more of a bug report.
Garuda installer may delete partitions unintentionally (without been checked for formatting)
Steps to reproduce:
In custom partition mode
If the selected /home partition is formatted other than btrfs it will be wiped out and formatted as btrfs no matter what the user selects without any warning or info about that.
Cheers!
I’m no expert on the Calames installer, but that would be the expected behaviour when installing Garuda.
Garuda installs the system only on BTRFS formatted drives/partitions.
Be sure to make backups before any destructive procedure that involves creating or deleting partitions.
What they are trying to do should work fine.
I tested and cannot reproduce this behavior. In my case the contents of the ext4 home partition were preserved as expected.
I did notice a bug in the UI. When I opened the ext4 partition to set a mount point, it incorrectly shows Btrfs for the filesystem (although on the partitioning menu it was correctly identified as ext4).
I’m not sure what that was all about.
Before installing, the overview correctly indicates that the ext4 partition will be set up with a mount point–it will not be formatted, no filesystem change.
When I reboot to the installed system, this is confirmed. The ext4 partition is mounted on /home, it is still ext4, and a test file I added before running the installer is still there–no data lost.
@apapamarkou, in your case I have to guess an error was made while running the installer–for example, not setting the radio button to “keep” for the partition contents in the partition setup step.
I can only confirm what @BluishHumility has said. I recently installed a system and both the root partition and the separate home partition retained ext4 as filesystem.
Maybe I’m out of touch, but in the past Garuda was only installable on a BTRFS partition. If Garuda is not installed on BTRFS then you would lose one of the distros biggest benefits, namely the ability to restore a snapshot from the grub boot menu.
This may have been changed by the Garuda devs, but I was not aware that a non BTRFS installation was now possible with Garuda.
I don’t like btrfs very much, so I deliberately avoid snapshots. I still back up manually or with grsync. If the system stops working after an update, of course I have to do it myself. This is my risk, but I accept it. I know how to deal with problems, and if not, I read about them.
It’s actually the same if you don’t do any preparation. If you create and format the ext4 partitions beforehand, you can select them as / and /home, keep them, and the installation goes smoothly.
The statement that Garuda can only be installed on btrfs is often found here in the forum. Although I knew this was not the case, I never wrote anything about it because I thought the team would probably not like it. After all, the support effort increases when no snapshots are available.
Since I’m flying under the radar with the KDE Light version of Garuda as far as support is concerned anyway, it doesn’t matter to me anymore.
However, I would not recommend my approach to inexperienced users of Linux and/or Garuda.
EDIT:
Corrected language of the quote.
The Calamares installer has been intentionally configured to only offer Btrfs as a filesystem when using the “erase” or “replace” installation types. There is no filesystem selection option at all, in fact:
The benefit of setting it up this way is it automatically eliminates all the issues that would inevitably be raised in the forum when someone chooses ext4 for their filesystem. “The snapshots are not working”, “I get all these messages about failed Snapper services”, and so on.
For advanced users who understand the implications of changing the filesystem this way, you can still install with ext4 by editing /etc/calamares/modules/partitions.conf before running the installer.
and
micro /etc/calamares/modules/partition.conf
Uncomment the availableFileSystemTypes line and add the filesystem choices you want in there.
availableFileSystemTypes: ["ext4","btrfs"]
Save and exit the file, then when you start the installer you will have the specified filesystem options available.
Or, as @Apocalypticus mentioned you can just create the partitions beforehand with another tool and then choose to not format them in the installer.
Obviously changing the default filesystem should be considered “unsupported”, but in the spirit of Arch Linux people are certainly welcome to configure their systems however they wish.
This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
