[SOLVED] Can anyone help me figure out how my disk is partitioned ?

Minaz

Commendable
Sep 20, 2021
118
4
1,585
I received a Raspberry Pi that included 2 boot options - the standard Pixel desktop for Raspbian, and a light OS for Kodi. On startup, the micro-SD card will give the option to booting to either one. I am very new to Pi and Linux in general, and I have been racking my mind on exactly how this was setup for me and where all the storage is. At first, I thought that maybe half of the SD card was devoted to each OS, but I am beginning to think that there is instead a common storage drive in between them (and each OS has its own smaller partition).
Can anyone figure out what each partition below is for? Specifically, which partition holds the Pi Raspbian OS, the lite OS for Kodi, and is there a common storage partition that both OS's can access as I suspect? Also, what is the "SETTINGS" partition for?

EDIT:
Okay, I am now suspecting that p8 and p9 are my Raspbian partitions, I am guessing p8 is the OS partition and p9 is the data storage partition for Raspbian. Which would mean that p6 and p7 are possibly the partitions for the lite OS for Kodi, and there is NO shared partition, which would be a huge waste of resources because I don't even use Kodi. If that is the case (a big IF), is there a way reduce the Kodi partition size and give it to Raspbian?

2nd Edit: digging around some more, I found out the name of the second OS for Kodi. It's LibreElec.

9jT1ZV.jpg
 
Last edited:
Solution
I would not immediately know how to do the same thing for that OS
The Terminal emulators are pretty much the same for all variants regarding copy/paste handling. To copy, select text and hit Ctrl+Shift+C.

But let' see what the data say.

  • RECOVERY : Not (auto) mounted on any of the OS. Maybe from old Windows or used some backup tool in the past ?
  • SETTINGS (ext4) : Not (auto) mounted on any of the OS.
  • boot (vfat) : This partition are shared between the two OS. I suspect this is less good practice.
  • root (ext4) : Also mounted as / in both OS.
  • etc, ...
So it seems that all partitions have same use (i.e. is shared) for both OS - or you have provided both screenshots from same OS.
Well, this is guessworking as is now. From what running OS/installation was the screenshot taken from?
Can you boot up to the other OS, then making the same screenshot (to see what partitions are mounted as what) ?

Alternatively (better, actually), in Terminal run sudo lsblk --fs and paste here.
 

Minaz

Commendable
Sep 20, 2021
118
4
1,585
Well, this is guessworking as is now. From what running OS/installation was the screenshot taken from?
Can you boot up to the other OS, then making the same screenshot (to see what partitions are mounted as what) ?

Alternatively (better, actually), in Terminal run sudo lsblk --fs and paste here.

The screenshot was taken from Raspbian. I am not at all familiar how to work with LibreElec, and without some research, I would not immediately know how to do the same thing for that OS.

Here is the screenshot of the lsblk command from Raspbian:
View: https://imgur.com/vzPmGXD


Additionally, the default included file manager for Raspbian shows two "hard drives": one called Storage with 54.5 GB and the other "system" with 511.7 MB. It doesn't see the other partitions (at least not in the default view that I was in).
 
I would not immediately know how to do the same thing for that OS
The Terminal emulators are pretty much the same for all variants regarding copy/paste handling. To copy, select text and hit Ctrl+Shift+C.

But let' see what the data say.

  • RECOVERY : Not (auto) mounted on any of the OS. Maybe from old Windows or used some backup tool in the past ?
  • SETTINGS (ext4) : Not (auto) mounted on any of the OS.
  • boot (vfat) : This partition are shared between the two OS. I suspect this is less good practice.
  • root (ext4) : Also mounted as / in both OS.
  • etc, ...
So it seems that all partitions have same use (i.e. is shared) for both OS - or you have provided both screenshots from same OS.
 
Solution