Re: Partitioning hard drives...

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:13:04 +1200, zed wrote:

Good afternoon from New Zealand.

I currently run LinuxMINT.

My computer has 2 x 200GB hard drives (one IDE and the other SATA), and I
seek advice as to the best way to partition them. Here is what I would like
to do.

IDE drive - partition as follows:
/boot/ext3 (would 100 MB be enough)
/root/ext3 (would 5 GB be enough)
/swap/ext3 (4 GB - I have 2GB RAM)
/home/ext3 (balance of HD)

Note: My present set up also has a partition named "extended". No idea where
it came from. Can someone explain, please?

SATA drive
/?? ext 3 (don't know what to name it but would like to use it to for all my
music files/image files, if possible)

Now for the questions:

(1) Are there any flaws in what I'm suggesting?
(2) Can I partition both the IDE and SATA drives on one pass through the
installation process?
(3) Or would I have to use GParted to partition the SATA drive after
installation?

It goes without saying that any alternative partitioning suggestions will be
more than welcome.

And a last question.

In subsequent installation of future versions of Linux, what do I do about
the separate Home partition? Do I just ignore it? Will the installation
procedure accept that or will it create another Home partition?

These questions must sound completely banal to those with more knowledge but
I don't want to get it wrong.

zed

I'll put in my tuppenceworth.

I have a Mepis7 installation and since its not shared with anyone I found
having a big home partition a waste of time. Currently, (and I have a lot
of junk installed), it looks like this

root partition 8 GB - 2.6 GB used.

home partition 5 GB - 1 GB used - most of this in a .wine folder with lots
of crappy windoze stuff.

swap partition - like you I went for 2x memory = 2GB. I have never seen
more than a tiny fraction of this used. Opened a monster size graphics
file once and I got up to 6% used. Dont really see the need for big swap
partitions when modern machines have large amounts of memory.

All the rest is divided up into ext3 data partitions. If you do any video
editing its worth having a NTFS partition for big video files. I also have
a small fat32 partition which is shared with a winxp virtual machine.

Upgrading - when I moved from mepis 6.5 to 7 it required a complete
reinstall. The home partition was backed up to one of the "data's" and
generally copied back, this saved all my mail, browser settings etc.,
although I had a bit of work to do putting some apps back into kmenu.

Final point. I do frequent backups, especially before I make any
significant change, using acronis truimage and a usb portable drive.
Currently backing up both the root and home partitions the images are
running at only 1.7 GB. Data gets backed up separately depending on
importance.

--
rich
.

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