Re: hard drive partitioning questions
In linux.debian.user, you wrote:
> thanks to all who responded -- this has been immensely useful. right
> now i'm thinking:
>
> / 100M
> /usr 3G
> /tmp 100M
> /var 3G
> swap 384M
> /home rest
>
> a couple questions more:
>
> - i need to make / bootable, right?
>
> - i don't think i need a /usr/local, as i don't think i usually
> download and compile a lot from non-debian sources ... but i might
> be wrong on that one. what do most people have in theirs?
>
> now, what i'm most confused on:
> - if i can only have 3 primary partitions if i want more than 4
> partitions total, do i just designate the first three (/, /usr, and
> /tmp) as the primary ones, and then just keep partitioning my merry
> way along, designating all the rest to be logical? will that work,
> or do i need to make four partitions, and somehow subdivide the last
> one into the rest of the partitions i want? i think it's the former
> and i'm just confusing myself ... please correct me if i'm wrong
> here.
>
> - i *do* need to specifically partition /home as its own partition,
> right? yeah, okay, i do. and this can be the entire rest of the
> disk? i don't need to leave anything left over? or should i, just
> as some sort of security backup, in case i were to need to
> repartition ... or is that not even an option?
>
> thanks again, all!
>
></nori>
>
> --
> .~. nori @ sccs.swarthmore.edu
> /V\ http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/~nori/jnl/
> // \\ @ maenad.net
> /( )\ www.maenad.net
> ^`~'^
>
I personally would not use the entire rest of it for /home. Yes, /home
would be its own partition. I'm not sure what you will use to partition - I
use fdisk. That has you do 'n' to add a partition. Then you choose if it
will be primary or not. The first three time through, you say primary.
Then you ask for an extended partition. After that, you say you want
logical partitions which will be parts of that extended partition.
I would not partition the entire drive. You may well find that later on you
will decide to compile a kernel or some programs. You may want to make more
partitions so that /usr/src can go on one and /usr/local can go on one. It
would be much better to start off with a 6 G home and make more partitions
to store data on later. They could have mount points like
/home/myuser/pictures and so on - whatever you collect that is big. I think
you said you have an 80G drive. That would be one very large /home.
Remember that this has to be fsck'd now and then. That takes a long time on
a large partition. If you put it all into /home, you will have no space
later for something else if /usr gets small etc. If you still have 50 G
sitting unpartitioned, you can make a 6 G /usr later and copy the current
one over there if you run out of room on that 3G.
Don't worry about what you make bootable. I've never done that and with
LILO or GRUB, the installer finds what it needs to boot. I am not sure, but
I think you need to make a bootable partition when you do not use a boot
loader. I could be totally wrong on that though. I just know that I've
never made a partition bootable and I've installed at least 20 times -
mostly using LILO. It could be that the installer did that for me.
Oh, another reason to keep more room unpartitioned is that you may want to
install something else some time. Once I copied my debian potato to a new
partition and then upgraded it to unstable/testing. That was fun. I kept
the stable one for a while and gradually just started using the 'unstable'
which was woody at the time. You just never know what you might want to do
with all that space.
--
Anita
GnuPG key: 1024D/9EDAC910
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