Re: Partitioning hard drives...

zed uttered these words of wisdom:
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)

My preference would be to include /boot in the /root partition and increase its size to 10GB as it is quite easy to get 5GB full with /usr binaries. I'd be amazed if you would ever need 4GB of swap, I suggest 2GB or even 1GB.
Thus:
/root 10GB ext3
/swap 2GB
/home Remainder of disk ext3


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

Each hard drive can only have 4 Primary partitions, if you need more then you have to use one of the Primary partitions as an Extended partition and this may then be subdivided into logical partitions, thereby giving you more than 4 partitions in total.

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)

How about /mnt/Music or /Media/Music or /home/username/Music. However if you use /mnt or /Media you will have change diectory ownership (chown) to your username so that you can write to it.

(2) Can I partition both the IDE and SATA drives on one pass through the
installation process?

All drives may be partitioned at install time.

(3) Or would I have to use GParted to partition the SATA drive after
installation?

You may do this if you prefer.


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?

Only format /root on reinstall and your /home partition will remain untouched and if you use the same username a new /home will not be created.



--
In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows or Gates?
.

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