Guide to BTRFS install?

[GreyGeek]

There are excellent guides to Btrfs by Oshunluver and others on this forum. Just search for Btrfs and note Oshunluver's posts.
The best source of Btrfs info is the Debian wiki:
https://wiki.debian.org/Btrfs
which was last updated on Nov 11, 2017.

You could install directly to the raw disk (/dev/sda) without creating /dev/sda1 partition, but I'd advise against that unless you are going with Oshunluver's approach. When you finish installing be sure that /etc/fstab contains the UUID hd designation and not a /dev/sdX assignment.
This is because if you add another drive and you've used /dev/sdX1 to assign the HD in fstab they could switch /dev/sdX designations.

For a standard kind of install to one disk with no intent to create a RAID or to install multiple distros, the best procedure is to delete all the existing partitions on the HD and then create one partition, sda1, and install to it using "/" as the mount point and Btrfs as the filesystem. The installation program will take care of the rest.
No swap partition is needed because Btrfs does not use swap partitions, nor swap files.

[mr_raider]

Btrfs does not need empty space at the start of a drive.

However, I have run in to an occasional issue with with MBR disks partioned with the windows XP era software.

Older software starts the first partition on sector 63, which may not allow the grub bootloader to fit full in the empty space. This is particularly important in complex installs, which may be the case for btrfs.

This solution is to create a small 1gb /boot partition formatted to ext4, which can then hold grub.

If you wish more guidance, start the Live USB. Open a terminal and enter the command

sudo parted -l

Then paste the output here for us.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A5010 using Tapatalk

[mastablasta]

After succesfull USB test i now started planning hard disk install.

I've searched for a few guides on how to install on BTRFS, but they are all quite old.

1. s there a good one for desktop PC not server?

2. Is it true BTRFS needs empty disk space at the start of the drive (one of the guides mentions that BTRFS needs about 1 Gb or so unnalocated disk space available at the start of the drive)? I don't think i have any since windows is now installed from the start of the drive..

3. Does BTRFS with it's different naming of partitions interfere with any standard skripts?

Partitioning of the OS drive is MBR with Windows XP taking about 500 GB of a 1 TB drive. about half of the drive is empty and this is where the Kubuntu could go.
The only other option would be getting a new drive for the Linux OS. but of course that costs money.