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A similar screen to the one shown just above will be displayed if you choose manual partitioning except that your existing partition table will be shown and without the mount points. How to manually set up your partition table and the usage of partitions by your new Ubuntu system will be covered in the remainder of this section.
If you select a pristine disk which has neither partitions nor free space on it, you will be asked if a new partition table should be created (this is needed so you can create new partitions). After this, a new line entitled “FREE SPACE” should appear in the table under the selected disk.
If you select some free space, you will have the opportunity to create a new partition. You will have to answer a quick series of questions about its size, type (primary or logical), and location (beginning or end of the free space). After this, you will be presented with a detailed overview of your new partition. The main setting is Use as:, which determines if the partition will have a file system on it, or be used for swap, software RAID, LVM, an encrypted file system, or not be used at all. Other settings include mountpoint, mount options, and bootable flag; which settings are shown depends on how the partition is to be used. If you don’t like the preselected defaults, feel free to change them to your liking. E.g. by selecting the option Use as:, you can choose a different filesystem for this partition, including options to use the partition for swap, software RAID, LVM, or not use it at all. When you are satisfied with your new partition, select Done setting up the partition and you will return to partman’s main screen.
If you decide you want to change something about your partition, simply select the partition, which will bring you to the partition configuration menu. This is the same screen as is used when creating a new partition, so you can change the same settings. One thing that may not be very obvious at a first glance is that you can resize the partition by selecting the item displaying the size of the partition. Filesystems known to work are at least fat16, fat32, ext2, ext3, ext4 and swap. This menu also allows you to delete a partition.
Be sure to create at least one partition for the root filesystem (which must be mounted as /) and possibly another one for swap - in case you dislike going with a swap file. If you forget to mount the root filesystem, partman won’t let you continue until you correct this issue.
If you boot in EFI mode but forget to select and format an EFI System Partition, partman will detect this and will not let you continue until you allocate one.
Capabilities of partman can be extended with installer modules, but are dependent on your system’s architecture. So if you can’t see all promised goodies, check if you have loaded all required modules (e.g. partman-ext3, partman-xfs, or partman-lvm).
After you are satisfied with partitioning, select Finish partitioning and write changes to disk from the partitioning menu. You will be presented with a summary of changes made to the disks and asked to confirm that the filesystems should be created as requested.
6.3.3.4. Configuring Multidisk Devices (Software RAID)