Installation Instructions for Custom Partitions Could Be Much Easier

I tried to install Qubes and wanted a custom partition. The reason is I wanted a fourth non-Qubes partition and also am using a different operating system on another drive. Apparently, however, in order to do this with LUKS2 (and not using LUKS2 but using Qubes seems bizarre), I needed to use the advanced features.

One thing that is really annoying about this is that there are no clear instructions or guides within the operating system about what is needed. I wish this were easier for users to do. Many times someone doing an install like that is offline at the time and trying to go online to figure out what to do is hard. A short paragraph about what to do once there inside the install would really make things more accessible for non-experts.

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I had a similar situation. I wanted to install Qubes on half of an ssd and leave the rest unformatted (with the intention of eventually formatting it and having it behave as a block device that I could attach to VMs).

I still have no idea how to do that. As you point out if you go custom, it doesn’t tell you what a “normal” installation would do (and that’s almost what I wanted to do).

Eventually I just set up the two partitions outside of the installer, then told the Qubes installer to use the first one and let it do its thing automatically.

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It occurs to me that this issue could be alleviated by having the installer fill in the values it would use and let people edit them, rather than just a blank line.

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