Guest klinger2004 Posted October 25, 2003 Report Share Posted October 25, 2003 Hi - I just ordered a new Maxtor 160 GB hd, so I will be installing RH9 for the 9th time in less than a month - I still have a long way to go on the learning curve so I keep reinstalling everytime I mess something up :) - I know that I should be able to fix and correct most problems I may cause - but I am kind of too obsessive-compulsive for that, at least until I know better. Anyway - my biggest question is - what are the (if any) benifits of creating a /usr and /var partition. I (think I) know the benifit of a /home partition so I can reinstall and keep all of my personal settings. But what about in a case such as (for example) mozille? I just installed 1.5 and I think it makes a hidden folder on my /home partition. What does that mean if I were to reinstall rh9? My second biggest question is what should I use to partition my drive before using the rh9 setup disks? When I use Disk Druid, it kinda changes my partitions around - for example originally I made hda1 my /boot, hda2 my /, hda3 my /home and hda4 my swap. after completing all of this - Disk Druid changed my hda2 to /home and hda3 to /. Why does it do this? I thought maybe a good idea was to use possibly a third party disk partitioner. ALSO - I wiant to be able to triple boot with Fedora Corer Severn and Mandrake 9.2 (when it comes out..) so what would be the best way to do this as far as the bootloader is concerned? I've tried before to install 2 Linux distros but I never had much luck with it, I can never seem to get it to list both in the Grub (my prefered choice) menu. I've tried installing Mandrake 1st then rh9, then rh9 first then MD (9.1), MD 1st then rh9 then md1 again. It never seems to work for me. I suppose first off I should create a /boot part for this. Lastly - Here are my initial thoughts on partitioning for these.... hda1 /boot - 100 mb REDHAT9 hda2 / - 10GB hda3 /home - 20GB hda4 SWAP (for all distros) - 2GB FEDORA hda5 / - 10 GB hda6 /home - 20GB MANDRAKE hda7 / - 10 GB hda8 /home - 20GB Then I would like to split the remainder of the disk up between 2 partitions - one for general files and another for downloads. How can I do this? I am thinking about adding a WinXP in there somewhere - not sure though - because I have 2 hds now, I was thing of swapping hdds (I have a bunch of swap trays) - but I was also thinking of setting them all up together so that I can run the swap off of the second disk. Any recommendations? Then I would need to setup differently I suppose. I have a raid mobo so I have plenty of ports but would I want to run a hdd off of a raid port? Hmmmm... Will all of these OSes even see my HPT 372 raid? I would need them to at boot time I suppose since there will be a swap. Or should I move my DVD burner to ide 3 (currently on ide2)? And if I do that, will setup see my cd drive ok? (of course I'll have to configure bios to boot from ide raid). current ides; (or will be when I get my new drive) ide 1 - maxtor 160 gb ide 2 indiDVD 4x ide 3 free ide 4 free As you can see - if pretty confused :? - Not sure what to do. If you have any tips or recommendations - please PLEASE offer them. Thanks!!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted October 25, 2003 Report Share Posted October 25, 2003 OK, I guess you know why to use seperate partitions, you don't say directly but your pretty close... anyway yep its so you can upgrade not reinstall and you don't need to format or create filesystems on these partitions. Basically OS files should be in /bin or Sbin (depending whether they need root permissions) wheras /usr should hold settings and non system programs (in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin) In a newwork environment you als0o have programs which are local to that machine. i.e. you might have a general setup but have some programs available only on certain machines. Therefore the /usr/local directory. Now theoretically certain progs go in different places.... i.e. KDE has a defined place in its makefile. Other programers (say koffice or kmail etc.) will expect KDE to be in certain places to get icons or helper progs etc. Unfortunately Redhat and hence Mandrake don't respect the places which is why its always better to use the correct RPM's for KDE. (Becuase these RPM's move everything to where Mandrake thinks it should be) So basically if the distro is consistent your settings etc shouldn't be overwritten if you upgrade or even install without formatting /usr and /home. /var is different .. its for (variable data).... Basically things that use logs etc write to /var/log Its used as a cache area to (like for /var/cashe/urpmi=) or a spooler for printer queues etc... and since one version of apacche that escapes me also for /var/www Basically for home use (so long as you remember to copy your web pages somewhere like /home/... your probably not too interested with old kernel logs etc.... Theres no reason /boot NEEDS to be seperate (though its good practice) you just copy yhe files created by the other install into the one you want to boot from.... in lilo i just then paste in the 'other distro and .. well boot=/dev/hda map=/boot/map default="2421-13-himem" keytable=/boot/uk.klt prompt nowarn timeout=100 message=/boot/message menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.21 label="2.4.21" root=/dev/hda1 initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.21.img append="noapic devfs=mount acpi=off hdc=ide-scsi" read-only image=/boot/bzImage label="GentooR5" root=/dev/hdb1 initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.20-gentoo-r5 append="hdc=ide-scsi" read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz-enterprise label="linux-enterpris" root=/dev/hda1 initrd=/boot/initrd-enterprise.img etc.etc.etc. If you notice I was too lazt to even change the kernel name from bzImage to linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r5 .. It could be called win.com for all the boot loader cares!! You might want to consider what you are using the distro's for, You can share a /home for instance but if you heavily cusomised KDE or Gnome etc with add ons you would need to do it for both!!! Otherwise you might get missing icons etc... Whichh brings us onto say KDE.... You could share /usr as well, then so long as the RPM's were compatible you would install into both by installing into one.... Same for Mozilla etc... In fact what I do is use symlinks for mozilla or fire/thunderbird or openoffce etc. on shared areas. I don't share mny homes becuase I have oodles of diskspace BUT Well this is mine [root@pc-00019 NVIDIA]# Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda1 5.3G 4.5G 593M 89% / /dev/hda7 47G 2.1G 43G 5% /deb /dev/hda5 29G 17G 12G 59% /home //zeus/Primary 38G 9.1G 29G 25% /mnt/Primary //zeus/gallery 38G 9.1G 29G 25% /mnt/gallery //zeus/music 38G 9.1G 29G 25% /mnt/music //zeus/netjuke 38G 9.1G 29G 25% /mnt/netjuke //zeus/yappa 38G 9.1G 29G 25% /mnt/yappa /dev/hdb1 13G 1.5G 11G 13% /mnt/gentoo /dev/sda1 19G 5.9G 13G 32% /mnt/removable2 /dev/hda8 27G 33M 26G 1% /mnt/shared My shared is actually emptry except for some symlinks at the moment BUT ... this might not be for you.... Decide how permanent the install is... my deb and gentoo partitions are just temporary so I have everything in one partition... If I switch this machine over to another main distro then I'd split them up and perhaps consolidate mandrake.... Personally I just use fdisk to create partitions...before installing... I don't trust diskdrake anymore becuase It screwed up writing to a partition on a different disk when it couldn't write to another...just left me in an endless loop and destroyed the filesystem and partition table on the other (data disk) [/code] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest klinger2004 Posted October 26, 2003 Report Share Posted October 26, 2003 Great! Thanks for the info - now, when you say fdisk (which I've heard others say) - are you talkin win98 boot disk or is there a Linux fdisk? Another question about partitions - If I do have a /home partition, and I reinstall my os - does it instantly use all the settings I had saved from a previous install? Or is it more or less for my files? Not too clear on this as of yet. AND - how big of a performance boost is there in having your swap on a different partition? because if I can get a multi boot situation going with RH9, Fedora (which will not be permanant until the stable full version comes) and Mandrake successfully - then I will leave the other hd for just WinXP. But if there is a HUGE difference, then I want to consider this as well. Thanks for your time to explain things. I really dig the Linux community bacause of people like you, Gowator! I appreciate it. Eric Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dalek Posted October 26, 2003 Report Share Posted October 26, 2003 In Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 there is a fdisk and a cfdisk. I like the cfdisk myself. I have done it in a console and it works. Just don't mess with any that are mounted, like the ones you booted from. I have created and deleted partitions in there. Mandrake has a copy on CD 1 in the dosutils directory. BTW, I want one of those. later :D :D :D :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dalek Posted October 26, 2003 Report Share Posted October 26, 2003 If you upgrade and want to save your /home partition amke sure you hit F1 and type in expert. It will ask you later if you want to format the partitions and you say NO to /home. It will save everything in the /home directory including most all of the settings and all your Documents folder stuff. Swap has to be on a seperate partition on Linux. Not like windoze on that one. You can have one swap that the OS's can share though. Just point Redhat and Mandrake to the same partition. It wipes it out during the shutdown and reboot anyway. No harm done there. Later :D :D :D :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted October 26, 2003 Report Share Posted October 26, 2003 OK, Lets go one by one. swap. A drive can't read and write at the same time. It doesn't matter if its a different partition or not, its either reading or writing. Indeed its only writing one thing at anyone time (although this is sliced about a bit) So moving your swap to a different disk can help. However, there are also limitations on the IDE interface, especially using the same IDE interface that make this less efficient than on SCSI. With serial ATA I don't actually know :D If I cat /proc/meminfo right now ... I get total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 1024483328 431714304 592769024 0 24379392 203833344 Swap: 822484992 0 822484992 MemTotal: 1000472 kB MemFree: 578876 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 23808 kB Cached: 199056 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 114248 kB Inactive: 266424 kB HighTotal: 98240 kB HighFree: 1532 kB LowTotal: 902232 kB LowFree: 577344 kB SwapTotal: 803208 kB SwapFree: 803208 kB i.e Im not using any swap. BUT... Its good to have some, although mem is much faster sometimes its busy!!! Also if i was using Xshmem or oracle I'd be using some pre-designated shared memory too. However, RAM is cheap nowadays so .... You can actually have multiple swap partitions and spead them over drives Then you set the priority in which they get used. Thus you could always use on on the other drive until its full then use the other. You make better use of the wasted space this way!!! For linux swap is just an empty filesystem which it uses RAW. If you have XP on one and linux's on the other just leave an empty space at the end of the XP disk and use that for swap... However, your smaller/older disk might be slower anyway. You might have to just test it and find out!!! We can help !!!! Don't worry To work out just what you'll loose you need to look under your home directory. If you look at the hidden files youll see .kde and .gnome etc. that hold your per user settings. As dalek says cfdisk is much friendlier!!! In fact its probably not any harder than diskdrake if you don't use the advanced menu's fdisk ... hmmm Very nice control and lots of detail but no choice but use the detail!! However, somethimes cfdisk doesn't work for me and fdisk does!!! Specifically on large disks!!! Thanks for your time to explain things. I really dig the Linux community bacause of people like you, Gowator! I appreciate it. hehe flattery will get you everywhere!!! Actually the real hero's are Paul and Anon and the mods who keep this place ticking over... For the rest of us i get just as much out as I put in!!! Stick with it and before you know where you are youll be answering posts and probs... :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest klinger2004 Posted October 26, 2003 Report Share Posted October 26, 2003 That for the reply, guys! Well, I did know that IDE can not read/write to the same channel simultaniously, but wasn't sure what to do as my swap almost never gets hit. And now since I am adding another 512mb of PC2700 DDR - not sure what to do. As far as having older drives - they are both identicle, just one bigger than the other - both Maxtor 7200 rpm ata133 - but the 160GB has an 8MB cache :) Now, again, as far as a setup goes... not exactly sure how to configure it. Gowator, I'll probably set up a multiboot setup with WinXP over 2 disks. Now I am thinking about moving my 2 main disks to my raid ports (ide 3 and 4) - of course just using them as extra ide (not raid config) and setting my bios to boot from "ata133raid". I know this works for a MS setup - but Linux, I am not sure. I'm not even sure if RH9 has detected that the 2 extra ports are there or not, my Hardware Browser gives no clue to this. But, RedHats hardware site said that RH will recognize most ata 133 controllers. And it is a HighPoint 372 chipset - fairly commen I think. So, I'm thinking that this wouold be my new scenerio... ide1 - indiDVD 4x DVD drive ide2 - for swap hdd (I will swap a hdd with another pc for the WinXP install - this drive will have audio multitrack files and will not be installed or used with Linux) ide3 - 160GB Maxtor ide4 - 80 GB Maxtor as far as partitions go, here's what I am thinking... DISK 1 - 160GB hda1 - winXP part - 10GB hda2 - RH9 / part - 20GB hda3 - RH9 /home - 20 GB hda4 - Mandrake / - 20 GB hda5 - Mandrake /home - 20GB hda6 - Fedora(or other) / - 20GB hda7 - Fedora(or other) /home - 20GB hda8 - general Linux shared part 1 - 30GB (for downloads) DISK 2 - 80GB hda9 - general Linux shared part2 - 78GB (for files) hda10 - swap for all Linux distros - 2GB What do you think? Not sure about a /boot partition. If I create a small 200 mb /boot then I will have to install WinXP on the 2nd part and then Windows will make that C and the second D, in trying this before, I was unable to start Windows after I installed rh9 and used what was c: as the /boot part. Unless I make partition 1 Windows and partition 2 a /boot partition - can I do that? Will this work? Thanks for the help! Eric ************EDIT************* PS - I just checked out my dmesg - here is what it reported... Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta3-.2.4 ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx ICH4: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:1f.1 PCI: Found IRQ 5 for device 00:1f.1 ICH4: chipset revision 2 ICH4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio HPT372: IDE controller at PCI slot 02:06.0 PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 02:06.0 HPT372: chipset revision 5 HPT372: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later HPT37X: using 33MHz PCI clock ide2: BM-DMA at 0xa400-0xa407, BIOS settings: hde:pio, hdf:pio ide3: BM-DMA at 0xa408-0xa40f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio hda: MAXTOR 6L080J4, ATA DISK drive blk: queue c03cdfe0, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) hdc: TDK DVDRW420N, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 hda: attached ide-disk driver. hda: host protected area => 1 hda: 156355584 sectors (80054 MB) w/1819KiB Cache, CHS=9732/255/63, UDMA(100) ide-floppy driver 0.99.newideI am ASSuming this means it detects my HTP chipset ok? And then it is probably safe to move my disks to 3 and 4 (well, 2 and 3 according to dmesg)? Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest klinger2004 Posted October 27, 2003 Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 *****Update***** Well - I did it - I got up the nerve and stayed up until 10 am (no sleep) and redid the whole thing. As I am still waiting for my Maxtor 160 GB to come via UPS - I still had 2 nearly identicle drives here - one a 40GB Maxtor 7200rpm ata133 and the other an 80 GB Maxtor 7200 rpm ata133. So, I threw the 40GB on ide3 and the 80 on ide4, my dvd on ide2 - and ide1 is left open for when I use a swap drive for audio with WinXP. For now, I decided to scap the idea of multibooting a million systems and get a solid box running, besides I have another somewhat newer AND XP setup to play with. So, here's my config as of now... hde1 - Windows XP- 10GB hde2 - RH9 / - 18GB hde3 - RH9 /home - 10GB hdg1 - swap - 2 GB hdg2 - extended partition for... -hdg5 - RH9 /Files - 28GB -hdg6 - RH9 /Backup - 44GB I had a heck of a time getting a grip on fdisk - I first created my part and installed Windont and then ran the RH9 setup - created my /, /home, and swap. After RH9 setup - I ran fdisk to create the other 2 parts and mounted them (/pat on the back). Now - back to the forums for other various questions. Thanks everybody for your help!!!! Greatly appreciated! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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