I have been using Linux Mint for a while now and it was time to try something new and different and I remembered stumbling upon Elementary OS around a year ago and tried it out in a VM. It was really promising but just too immature a project for me to be running it on my Desktop. And year has passed — and now it’s time to give it a second go.

One of the things I was very fond of in my Mint setup was the BTRFS file system build with 4 disks in RAID10, and I wouldn’t do without it! So if Elementary OS should stand a chance in the game of becoming my new main OS it should at least support that.

I Googled around for a while to find information on how to setup such system, and I even asked on Elementary OS’ QA board but no luck so far, so I signed on to their IRC channel to find support, no answers were to find anywhere.

I struggled on; I haven’t given up yet, because I’ve had experience with both Debian and Ubuntu installers in the past, so I have some knowledge about how such installers work, and since Elementary OS is build on Ubuntu just like Linux Mint, I thought I would give it a try anyway.

1. Up and running

There she is, isn’t she beautiful?

As you probably have guessed we need to do some custom stuff in order for our mission to succeed, so let’s hit the ‘Try elementary OS’ button and get started. — Hmm..For some reason the desktop restarts.

2. Partitioning

I’m gonna go with a RAID10 setup with 4 disks.

Showing that i’m using 4 disks

I’m pretty old school/autistic about my RAID setup, so since I have 4 equally sized disks, the partitioning of each will be the same, which was required by hardware RAID controllers back in the days.

2.1. Start GParted

Now start the partitioning tool GParted, which you can find in the ‘Applications’ menu in the top right corner.

I’m gonna use a GPT partition table because I’m finding myself in the year 2014.

2.2. Create partition table

Creating ‘Partition Table’ on ‘/dev/sda’