repartition my HDD

[igotnoluck]

Hi,

i want to change the partitions on my hdd from the current (not good paratitioning) to a better one, i have 2 questions:

1. is there a program which allow me to change the partitions without remount / reinstall

2. what is the best options for partitioning, now i'm using a bad one but i want to change to this:

 

#1 /boot - 100mb

#2 /swap - 2GB (my ram is 2GB)

#3 / - 15 GB

#4 /usr - 15GB

#5 /home - 50GB

#6 fat32 - 90 GB

 

should i mount var ? tmp ? and if so how big should i make them ?

[pindakoe]

There isn't a lot to be gained by going beyond three partitions (/, swap and /home) for most domestic uses, with something like fat32 or ntfs added for legacy reasons. Thus, I would give say 10 Gb to / (I use 3.1 Gb and have a fair bit of apps installed), 2 Gb for swap (you ver y likekly can get it away with a lot less unless you run loads of services and apps; monitor swap usage for a while during usage by typing 'free' every so often) and splitting the rest between /home and fat32.

[arctic]

If you plan to change your partition structure a lot, then better start from scratch after backing up your personal data. I agree, more than three partitions is usually not needed for home users. My suggestion:

 

/ = 10-15 GB

/swap = 1GB (should be more than enough)

/home = rest of space

/ntfs or vfat = 50 GB

[scarecrow]

A separate /boot partition is useful only if you boot many Linux flavours... and anyway 100 MB is quite big (can hold some twenty kernel images, or more).

2G swap is too much- lower it to 256M or 512M (I also have 2GB RAM, set my swap to 256M and AFAIK never made use of it for the last couple of years or so).

15G for / is also biggish (10 tops), you don't need /usr at all (maybe /var, if you are setting a corporate server and you want to handle bulky logfiles) and why use FAT32? It's slower than NTFS with ntfs-3g, and can't handle files larger than 4GB.

[coverup]

A separate /boot partition is useful only if you boot many Linux flavours... and anyway 100 MB is quite big (can hold some twenty kernel images, or more).

2G swap is too much- lower it to 256M or 512M (I also have 2GB RAM, set my swap to 256M and AFAIK never made use of it for the last couple of years or so).

15G for / is also biggish (10 tops), you don't need /usr at all (maybe /var, if you are setting a corporate server and you want to handle bulky logfiles) and why use FAT32? It's slower than NTFS with ntfs-3g, and can't handle files larger than 4GB.

I often see suggestions that there is no need to allocate more than 512MB to swap. However, if it's a laptop and I want to be able to suspend, then shouldn't swap be bigger than RAM by at least 30%?

 

Also, there are buggy applications which use a lot of swap space. I had this experience with evolution 2.0.x which due to some weird bug, could actually fill up entire swap and hung the computer. With that version of evo, swap was always about 50% full.

[AussieJohn]

Scarecrows suggestion is the same as I have been using for over three years and have never felt the need to change it. The only thing I do differently and in addition to what was suggested is that I made a very large partition for Music and a slightly smaller one for graphics and photos since I have two 120Gb Sata II HDs.

 

Since I am usually running two versions of Mandriva, I have only 512Mbs of swap on each HDD and each Mandriva detects them both and can use them as they require.

I don't know what if any swap is actually used because I never have problems in that regard. I have 1Gb of memory (Twinex 2 x 512Mbs).

 

I suspect that a lot of new Linux users suffer from the Windows syndrome and the problems they had in Windows and actually look for a problem that doesn't really exist in Linux since Linux uses Memory quite differently.

 

Cheers. John.

[igotnoluck]

I suspect that a lot of new Linux users suffer from the Windows syndrome and the problems they had in Windows and actually look for a problem that doesn't really exist in Linux since Linux uses Memory quite differently.

 

i think i'm one of this cases :)

 

thank you all i will now try to reorgenize my partitions :)

thanks

[scarecrow]

I often see suggestions that there is no need to allocate more than 512MB to swap. However, if it's a laptop and I want to be able to suspend, then shouldn't swap be bigger than RAM by at least 30%?

Also, there are buggy applications which use a lot of swap space. I had this experience with evolution 2.0.x which due to some weird bug, could actually fill up entire swap and hung the computer. With that version of evo, swap was always about 50% full.

This is true with swsusp. However, the current norm for suspend-to-disk operations ( TuxOnIce, formerly suspend2 ) supports suspending to file and not just to swap.

And about the buggy apps: yes, they can eat a lot of CPU and RAM. But eating the whole 2GB RAM monty is utterly unlikely.

[darkscot]

1. is there a program which allow me to change the partitions without remount / reinstall

I have done changed/deleted partitions twice while using Mandriva. Once I used Gparted from within Mandriva and once I used a Parted Magic CD. On both occasions afterwards I could NOT get Mandriva to boot, despite my best efforts, and had to do a complete re-install.

[ianw1974]

Depends how you were doing it. If you moved the beginning of the partition and thus moving the partition from one area of the disk to another, this would explain why it's not working. If the partitions remained in the same place, and were simply resized, then another explanation could be that the partition number changed, and hence your problem. If neither of these, then we'd need to know exactly what you did that stopped it from working after changing/deleting partitions.

[coverup]

This is true with swsusp. However, the current norm for suspend-to-disk operations ( TuxOnIce, formerly suspend2 ) supports suspending to file and not just to swap.

And about the buggy apps: yes, they can eat a lot of CPU and RAM. But eating the whole 2GB RAM monty is utterly unlikely.

So, which of the two suspend-to-disk mechanisms does Mandriva 2008 use as default?

[scarecrow]

So, which of the two suspend-to-disk mechanisms does Mandriva 2008 use as default?

 

Most likely its using suspend which is not considered terribly reliable, but it does have a flashy interface and supports suspending even to network shares.