Re: why make partitions?

[glhenni@cs.sandia.gov (Gary L. Hennigan)]

Lazarus Long <lazarus@frontiernet.net> writes:
| On Tuesday, June 01, 1999 at 14:46:01 -0500, Jens B. Jorgensen wrote:
|  > Message-ID: <[🔎] 37543879.D8DCC9D7@bdsinc.com>
|  > X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; I)
|  > X-UIDL: e4da9602a16b12e6fe1dfa928c15b9e8
|  > 
|  > The best reason I can ever come up with for creating separate
|  > partitions is to 
|  > allocate space which can't be spared: eg. create a separate /home
|  > so users with 
|  > accounts on the system can't screw up the system by filling up
|  > the disk or so that 
|  > runaway log files can't fill up / and screw things up.
| 
| IMO, the best reason to make partitions is so the KERNEL will be
| guaranteed to be located below cylinder 1024 for /sbin/lilo.  Otherwise,
| later kernel installations will run the risk of making your system
| unbootable from those kernels (or at all even.)

I can think of a couple of other minor reasons:

1) fsck time. This can be annoyingly large for large partitions and
even if you never foresee your system coming down improperly, e.g.,
without a proper shutdown, ext2 requires periodic fsck (I think the
default is every 20 mounts)

2) Backups. Although I generally just back up my home machine all at
once, e.g., tar cvf /dev/nst0 /, it is often convienent to back up a
single partition at a time, e.g.
  tar --create --file=/dev/nst0 --one-file-system /
  tar --create --file=/dev/nst0 --one-file-system /usr
  etc.

This makes it faster to do incremental backups for a particular
partition. It also allows you to more easily have some redundancy in
your backup scheme.

Of course neither of these are overwhelmingly compelling...

Gary