Partition Scheme
Alpine's wiki says that only a root partition is required. Despite this, all example partition schemes mention a boot partition. I could not get it to start without one.
Even when I was able to boot, that partition never seemed to get mounted, and errors were shown. Format your drive and reboot before doing the rest of the installation, as the new partitions might not be shown until rebooting.
Recovering Nuked Partitions
I deleted and recovered my home partition twice while I was trying to get the installation to work. In this case, run apk add testdisk. After starting testdisk, select "Proceed" and "Analyze" on the deleted partition.
Resources
- Installation with manual partitioning
- Connecting to Wi-Fi during installation
- File system tools for formatting
Update: 2025 Jan 4th
I installed Alpine without overwriting my home partition by doing the following instead of using the manual installation guide that is linked above:
fdisk /dev/sda reboot apk add e2fsprogs mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdaX # repeat for new partitions, with X being the number of the partition setup-alpine # answer "none" when asked where to install mount -t ext4 /dev/sda3 /mnt # replace 3 with the number of the root partition mkdir /mnt/boot mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot # replace 1 with the number of the boot partition mkdir /mnt/home mount -t ext4 /dev/sda2 /mnt/home # replace 2 with the number of the home partition setup-disk -m sys /mnt reboot
When mounting the boot partition, there were no errors. I double-checked by rebooting and, again, found no errors.
However, after compiling dwm and st and rebooting, the files in the /boot folder were removed. I got the same errors with the boot partition as before.
When I reinstalled Artix, I decided on using dinit instead of OpenRC. It starts up faster, but there is less documentation for it since it is newer.