I have a laptop with 2 hard drives 1 is an m.2 SSD 250gb and a 1 TB hard drive I would like to know how to configure this system so that my SSD has the os but the 1tb hard drive handles storage thanks for your time


In order to setup your PC in the way you described before, you can do a Manual Partition when you are installing ElementaryOS.

Since I don't know the level of experience you (or the person reading this question) have, I'm going to do a very detailed tutorial so it is clear enough almost for everyone.

I recommend you to firstly check this, basically there's explained how you can manually partition your disk to install a GNU/Linux distribution, in this case Ubuntu.

When you are installing ElemOS, there is a step which is called "Installation Type". It should look like this: Installation type, ElemOS

Select the Something else option.

The installer will take you to a partition table. There you can see all your Storage Devices. There's also a tab below where they are listed.

So, the trick is on the /home partition. There is where all your Documents, Photos, etc... are saved. On your HDD create a new partition with the size you prefer, mount it as /home and use it as ext4. (Check this again if you have any questions).

On your SSD you can create the swap area, / (root) and /bootpartitions. If you are not sure how large should each partition be, go back here again.

Be careful, since the previous post is a little bit old, it does not have info about UEFI.

Further information about UEFI can be found here. The really important thing is knowing if your PC works with UEFI or Legacy. If you are not sure you can google it. (Example: Lenovo Ideapad ### UEFI or Legacy?) Usually you can setup it on the BIOS, but that goes off topic.

If you have Legacy, you can create the /boot partition as it is shown here and it's done. Now you have your SSD for the OS and the HDD for storage!

If you have UEFI, don't create the /boot partition since your PC won't recognize it. Instead create an EFI system partition. 200MB sould be more than enough. (I recommend 100MB).

EFI Partition System

And voila, you have finished!

Please let me know if you have any other question or if something wasn't clear enough.

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