Re: Newbie question on partitioning (primary/logical drive ?)
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ThinKer wrote:
| Hello all,
|
[...]
| I am currently trying to install Debian as my fourth Linux
| distribution. I have used Mandrake, Redhat and SuSE in the past and I
| wanted a more challengeing installation so that I might learn more about
| Linux. Well, I am getting a challenge.
|
| Here are my system specs.
|
| PROC: Pentium 120
| RAM: 64 MB
|
| Primary IDE Master: 4.1 GB
| Primary IDE Slave: 1.2 GB
| Secondary IDE Slave: 4.1 GB
|
|
[...]
| So I am sitting here looking at the screen (cfdisk 2.11n) and it is
| asking me to select a drive to partition with the list of
|
| /dev/hda
| /dev/hdc
| and
| /dev/hdd.
|
| How should I allocate this space? I deleted one of the drives and
| selected 'NEW'. Then it asks me [Primary] [Logical] [Cancel] , so I
| selected 'Primary'. Gave it the full size and now I have no idea what to
| do. I am not really sure what I just did.
|
If you're feeling adventurous, you might take a look at LVM (Logical
volume manager). With that, you could create a large partition on each
drive, combine them into a "Logical Volume Group", and then split that
LVG into multiple "Logical Volumes" which look like partitions, but can
be resized and reassigned dynamically.
The installer doesn't support LVM, and I haven't seen a Debian-oriented
HOWTO, but what I did was to create one smallish partition on one disk
and one which takes up the rest of the disk. Install the base debian
system onto the small partition (I made it 500Mb, but you could probably
get away with half of that). When it gets to selecting packages, stop
and deal with LVM. You need to make sure your kernel supports it (Must
be 2.4, and must be configured.) Install package "lvm10" for the tools.
~ You can then create logical volumes for /home, /usr, /var. Boot into
single-user mode and move the existing files into the new volumes.
It doesn't matter now what sizes you use for the partition. Make them
as much as you need to start with, and when you need more it's easy to
make them bigger. (If you put reiserfs filesystems on them, you can make
the filesystems bigger without even unmounting them).
With multiple disks, you can use "striping". I've not done this as I
have only one disk, but it's in the documents referred below.
There's a lot to all this, but if your aim is to learn more about linux
it's a useful thing to find out about.
Andrew
example of moving files into a new filesystem (once you have created
your volume group):
(in single-user mode ( boot with the "single" kernel command-line option ) )
lvcreate -L 1G -n usr myvg01 # to create a logical volume
mke2fs /dev/myvg01/usr # or you might prefer ext3 or reiser
mount /dev/myvg01/usr /mnt
cd /usr
tar cf . | ( cd /mnt ; tar xvf - ) # there are also options on cp that
~ # would achieve the same thing.
umount /mnt
mv /usr /oldusr
mkdir /usr
mount /dev/myvg01/usr /usr
rm -r /oldusr # If everything succeeded.
Information on LVM: http://www.sistina.com/products_lvm.htm
LVM HOWTO: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
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