NitramBelac Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 How big should I make my linux partition? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 How big's your hard drive? Bear in mind you need a swap partition also, and the usual way is to have it twice your RAM. So, if 256MB ram, then 512MB of disk space for Swap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NitramBelac Posted May 6, 2005 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 the HD that I want to partition is 160 gigs... I have 100 free and I have 1534mb of ram so that's 3.068 gigs for the swap partition right? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 As a rule, the doubling only really applies when you have < 1GB, which is how I normally do it. If you have 1GB or more then you can do it differently. Example, my laptop has 1GB of RAM, and my swap is 512MB. This is suffice for anything I do on it, but if you heavily use your system, then you may want to have 1GB for the swap. It depends if the install you're doing now is a permanent solution or not. If just for messing, you can set it to anything you like, but if permanent, go for 1GB it'll be enough. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NitramBelac Posted May 6, 2005 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 (edited) alright, so how big should I make the other partition? oh and I'm using partition magic for this... what's the difference between primary and logical? Edited May 6, 2005 by NitramBelac Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 (edited) Do you have anything else installed on the system? If not, when you see the disk representation, first have your EXT3 partition set up as big as you want it to be, then to the right of it, configure the swap. If you have Windows on it, then Windows will be first, then EXT3 for data, and then the Swap. If you have the system permanent, then there's another way. Windows first, then EXT3 for /, then EXT3 for HOME, then Swap. This is so if you upgrade, you don't lose your data in /HOME. It's entirely up to you how big you have the EXT3 partition. But make sure is EXT3, so that you get the added features of journaling in case of a system crash. It will help recover for you then! You have 100GB free, so if you want to give 99GB to Linux EXT3 and 1 GB to swap, then that would be fine. Maybe 2GB for swap would be best though. Depends if you want to use the rest of the disk for something else! Note, you can't see Linux partitions in Windows, but you can see the other way around. Just in case you want to use some of that 100GB for Windows. Hope this helps. Edited May 6, 2005 by ianw1974 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NitramBelac Posted May 6, 2005 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 partition magic is automaticly putting it to EXT2 so I should change it to EXT3? and I will still be using windows, I want to save all my files and stuff from linux on thi partition(fat32) so I can still access some of them on windows... so 99gigs would wrong for this EXT3 partition right? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 You don't need to use Partition Magic for the Linux stuff. I am guessing, you resized the Windows partition to free up some disk, or already had it spare. Then all you need to do is leave the rest of the disk empty. Don't use Partition Magic to create the partitions. When you install Linux, you will do all the disk config on there. You can choose the option to let me choose what to do, and then go from there. If you want Linux permanently, then configure / partition, home and swap. An example: / = 60GB HOME =38GB SWAP = 2GB Then for upgrades, you can leave Home as it is, and just replace the / partition with the new Linux OS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 You do not need more than 500MB swap. ever. I would make 5 partitions: /, /home, /usr, fat32, and swap swap=500MB /= 4G /home= 30G /usr= 30G fat32=30G I store alot in /home so my /home is larger. If you intend to use the fat32 more for shared storage, decrease /home and increase fat32. Also, while ext3 is fine, I have used reiserfs for years because of its excellent recovery. And I use it in root as well. Just need the appropriate designation in fstab. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polemicz Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 Unlike like Ixthusdan I don't store a lot on my /home partition and instead have another partition, which is as big as it can be. My /home is 1GB and could be lots smaller. The big hog there is e-mail. I use / (1GB), /usr (3GB),/home (1GB), and swap (512MB). /usr will depend on how much software you install and I have rarely gone beyond 2.5GB. Having most of my things on a partition separate from /home makes it easy to mess with other distros and share data (have to be careful with uids and gids as Mandriva has a different numbering scheme). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 I know when I installed MDK 10.0 Official on the following spec: AMD K6/2 475MHz, 284MB RAM, 10GB HDD. that I had to have a large swap drive because it ran like a dog if it was any smaller. It maybe because MDK 10.x wasn't designed for this type of machine. I expect when at CLI it wouldn't be too much of a problem, but when in KDE it was sooo slow. You couldn't even run the game Frozen Bubble! It wouldn't load. :o And when monitoring the memory, you could see it was all maxed out! That was with a 520MB swap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 When partitions were originally created (way back in the dark ages), you could only have a maximum of 4 partitions. The partition table (which is the first sector of your hard drive (or close enough) had four entries. But people wanted more partitions so the extended partition was created. An extended partition is one of the four partitions but can be sub-divided into any number of "logical" partitions (I'm generalizing). Using this, you can have many more partitions than four. So the rules are.. 1. Only one primary partition will be an extended partition. 2. At any time you can have between 1 - 4 primary partitions. You do not have to have all 4 in order to use your hard drive. 3. You have to create the extended partition before you create the logical partitions. Sometimes software will just go ahead and do this for you. 4. The extended partition is the only partition that can hold logical partitions. 5. All of the logical partitions have to fit in an extended partition so make it big enough. 6. The linux names for these partitions are: hda1 hda2 <- lets say this is your extended. hda3 hda4 afterwards, you are referring to logical partitions you have created that exist physically within the extended partition hda5 hda6 and so on An example of a setup. hda1 - primary 15 gig - windows XP hda2 - extended partition - fills rest of hard drive. -----> hda5 - linux / -----> hda6 - linux /usr -----> hda7 - linux /home -----> hda8 - linux swap -----> hda9 - vfat (Fat32) - media/work/whatever Generally, I've found that /usr/home can be around 10 gig comfortable for a home installation. / can be as small as about 600 meg but I suggest a gig. Another setup.. hda1 - primary - 10 gig hda2 - primary hda3 - primary hda4 - extended -------> hda5 - rest of drive Its totally up to you. One good idea is to have a 1st drive that has your windows and media on it. 2nd drive is your linux drive. Special note:!!! Do not create extended partitions with linux and then use the windows disk manager to modify it. You will possibly lose everything because windows disk manager does not recognize linux extended partition table entries. (not recently tested though) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 If you intend to use the fat32 more for shared storage, decrease /home and increase fat32. I wouldn't do that. Extending a FAT32 partition over 32 GB equals to bucketloads of slack harddisk space and extremely poor performance- in fact mr. Gates has tuned Windows 2000 and XP to be able to create a FAT32 partition being 32 GB maximum. Of course you can create larger FAT32 partitions by other indirect means, but it ain't a good idea at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 Actually, I would also hold back some unused space for playing with other distros! I use one physical drive for windows and the other for linux city. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ffrr Posted May 6, 2005 Report Share Posted May 6, 2005 If you intend to use the fat32 more for shared storage, decrease /home and increase fat32. I wouldn't do that. Extending a FAT32 partition over 32 GB equals to bucketloads of slack harddisk space and extremely poor performance- in fact mr. Gates has tuned Windows 2000 and XP to be able to create a FAT32 partition being 32 GB maximum. Of course you can create larger FAT32 partitions by other indirect means, but it ain't a good idea at all. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> So, what would be the best partition type for a large shared area (that Windoiws can still access)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.