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Partitioning and Mounting

My configuration has extra helper scripts for partitioning and mounting the system.

These scripts live in [hosts/HOSTNAME/disks.nix] (which must customized to fit your specific configuration).

Table of Contents

Preflight Checks

Variables to Check

Make sure you check the capitalized variables located within the let block in your device’s hosts/HOSTNAME/hardware/hardware-configuration.nix and hosts/HOSTNAME/hardware/disks.nix files! These values are crucial to the scripts you’ll run in the next steps as well as for how NixOS configures itself to read your partitions. NOTES:

  • When editing any of the path variables, always include / in the beginning and where else is necessary!
  • In order to get the get the correct value for the DISK variable located in disks.nix for your drive, check the /dev/disk/by-id and locate the name of your drive (without anything at the end like -part1)
    • The path should look something like /dev/by/disk/by-id/InterfaceType-OEMINFO with InterfaceType being how its connected to your machine (like usb or nvme) and OEMINFO being the extremely long string that has the OEM of the device aswell as serial number (in some cases).
  • Make sure the SWAP_PATH and SWAP_SIZE variables in hardware-configuration.nix and disks.nix match each other! The SWAP_SIZE variable in disks.nix is string while the one in hardware-configuration.nix is an integer.
  • For the SWAP_FILE variable in the disks.nix file, the path is relative to /mnt on the iso (since that’s where it will be mounted to when running the disks-mount command).

Partitioning Steps

1. Creating the Partitions

Execute nix run .#nixosConfigurations.$HOSTNAME.config.disks-create to create the disks. Please be warned that this command will destroy everything on the disk so make sure you correctly defined the device in the configs and backed up everything!!! If necessary, unplug important devices you don’t want to get wiped!

2. Formatting the Partitions

Execute nix run .#nixosConfigurations.$HOSTNAME.config.disks-format to format the filesystems on the newly created partitions

3. Mounting the Partitions

Execute nix run .#nixosConfigurations.$HOSTNAME.config.disks-mount to mount all of the newly created partitions to the live installer

4. Retrieving Partition IDs

Execute nix run .#nixosConfigurations.$HOSTNAME.config.disks-retrieve to obtain the necessary values for the variables MAIN_PART and BOOT_PART, needed for the hardware-configuration.nix file. The output is preformatted with the variable names and their respect partition IDs, so one just simply needs to copy over the output into the file. The output should follow the following format in the console:

MAIN_PART = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX";
BOOT_PART = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/XXXX-XXXX";

If the output isn’t correct, then instead run nixos-generate-config --show-hardware-config --root /mnt, it will output a base configuration file that the installer provides; containing the partition ids and see what are the ids for the newly created partitions (as well as other additional settings that are needed for your system).

Optional Steps

Only do these if you’re using a setup that includes what my setup uses (like swapfiles)

Creating Swapfiles and Obtaining Resume Offset for Hibernation

Execute nix run .#nixosConfigurations.$HOSTNAME.config.create-swapfile to create the swapfile aswell as calculate what the resume-offset value should be for the current system. This is required since I’m using swapfiles and want to enable hibernation. Since there is no swap partition, the system needs to know where the swap header is on the system’s disk (aka, it needs to know on which disk block sector the swapfile is located). Once it’s ran, the resume offset value is echoed into the console; then you must take this value and put it in the hosts/HOSTNAME/hardware/hardware-configuration.nix file under the RESUME_OFFSET variable.

Final Notes

  • Once you finish all of these steps, move on to the next steps of Installation!