mousematt Posted October 27, 2003 Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 I am preparing to do a clean install of 9.2 and would like to hear everyone's advice on disc partitioning. I have a 40GB harddrive and 9.2 will be the sole OS - it is essentially a desktop box with a single user - how do I set it up? My one requirement is that I keep one 9GB ext3 partition called /backup - i won't wipe that. That leaves 31Gb to play with... Share your thoughts Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qchem Posted October 27, 2003 Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 Do you listen to much music etc. on that box? To be perfectly honest I'd be tempted to create /home of maybe 5GB and leave the rest as / If you do listen to many ogg's or MP3's then perhaps put them in a seperate partiton - maybe 10 GB. I tend to find little or no improvement in fancy partitoning schemes on a desktop box using relatively slow disks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mousematt Posted October 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 Do you listen to much music etc. on that box? To be perfectly honest I'd be tempted to create /home of maybe 5GB and leave the rest as / If you do listen to many ogg's or MP3's then perhaps put them in a seperate partiton - maybe 10 GB. I tend to find little or no improvement in fancy partitoning schemes on a desktop box using relatively slow disks. Yes, my PC is my personal stereo. Would you create a seperate partition? How big? 10GB? Also, how do I change the permissions so I can write to it as non-root? Any thoughts, about this or partitioning in general? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scoopy Posted October 27, 2003 Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 How about? 9 GB /backup 4 GB / 5 GB /home 15 GB /storage 7 GB unpartitioned 4 GB for root is same as what I did with 9.2 and I have installed KDE, Gnome2, Apache, etc and only filled 1/3 of that, which leaves me with 2 1/2 gig left for more apps. The 15 gig for storage should make it easy to move files as a regular user (should be able to change the permissions on that partition... not sure how exactly). That leaves 7 gig that I would leave unpartitioned for now and save for any possible changes in the future, such as, a test partition for another distro, or space for a ftp server, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted October 27, 2003 Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 4G / 8G /usr 8G /home 2G /var 8G /storage (or whatever, call it Ethel!) 500MB SWAP Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted October 27, 2003 Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 Qchem, is rt. No need for anything fancy on a desktop. 9GB=/backup 4GB to max 5GB= / (I've never needed more than 3.5GB, and that's with /usr, /var in it) 5GB=/home (everyone seems to aggree on a big home, though I make mine 1GB to 2GB, but then, I don't put anything there, I put stuff in a 5GB /share partition.) Up to you, because you know what you'll put there. If you're the only user, make /home 10GB+ and just put 'media' there. Otherwise/and/or.....---> 10GB+Fat32 partition= /stuff. This will take care of your permission prob with more of a security risk (if that's a concern). If you use a linux partition for 'stuff', SEE: chown --help and/or man chown If you have less than 1000MB RAM and/or run for days, months, etc... don't forget the swap :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Whatever you do, prepare for dualboot. (waitaminute, is he going to say you will want windows too? Answer: NO. Read on.) You are going to want to make an extra ext3 (or whatever) partition for a second linux install. /alt 4-6GB ext3 (would be my advice) They when betas and rc's come out, you can test those, or even install another distro, or new edition etcetc... install them on your /alt partition (well, that one would then be the / partition, and your regular / you mount in that system on /alt). Advantages: you get to try out the new version, without hosing your old. You get to not have to make backups of your /etc/[configfilenamehere] files, since you can just copy them from /alt/etc/[configfilenamehere] to /etc/. All I would advice in addition, especially if you are going to boot completely different systems, is to use one bootloader for one, and another for the other system. I use lilo on the MBR on my base system (currently 9.1), and lilo on a bootflop for the additional system (9.2, also had RH there for a while etcetc). That way, I just start the computer, with the floppy out of the drive I get 9.1, with the floppy in the drive I get 9.2. Example: Partition | system A mountpoint | system B mountpoint hda1 | / | /alt hda5 | swap |swap (nothing to do here, the secondary system will autorecognise) hda6 | /home | /home or /althome (*1) etcetc. *1) in the latter case (/althome), your alternative system will initially have a /home dir on the / partition, of course you can link to the right /althome/[user] dir. Your users may not have the same user id, so check man chown and man chgrp.... I have never needed more than 5GB for the / partition, but then I had large partitions for /home (some new ones from an extra hd were mounted on /mnt and linked from my homedir) and games etc went in there. I have also never used separate partitions for /var /usr /etc /boot etcetc. But by all means, feel free to try. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarissi Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Only 1 hard disk? Eek! My current setup is 2 x 61 GB Maxtor ata100, and a 160 GB Maxtor ata133. Partions are: hda: 61 GB maxtor / = 4 GB swap = 3 GB /tmp = 10 GB /var = 10 GB /usr = 29.3 GB hdb: 160 GB maxtor /home = 160 GB hdc: 61 GB maxtor /pics = 27.8 GB /archives = 29.5 GB Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mousematt Posted October 28, 2003 Author Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Yes its only one hard disc. This box is just a basic desktop - most of the time its a glorified typewriter... I don't dual boot and don't test run two seperate distros... I just use Linux. I bit the bullet tonight and ordered a 9.2 PowerPack from Mandrakesoft's australian distributor. It should ship soon enough... Thanks everyone for your support I think I might partition something like this... boot 32MB root 8GB home 12GB (includes most of my oggs) backup 9GB free 11GB (I'll find a use for it soon enough) Any criticisms? Also, do I use all ext3 or is something better for what I do? (type, surf and listen to Beethoven:P) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 I've always heard /boot should be ext2. Don't use one myself....I think it makes things a mess, but that's JMO. Have fun! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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