I have a question about how best to divide things up in the new setup.
I'm thinking to replace this IDE drive with two SATA HDs. One as small as I can get. Say 100GB or so and make that the boot drive. And a second HD say 500GB or so and moving the LVM over to that.Would it be better to move the LVM to a larger SATA drive and migrate the boot drive on to a new small IDE HD?
No. I've even thought to set it up
Only if you really doubt the integrity of your HD, or want to install onto a system too small to include the kernel. Bootable flash drives are invaluable if you have to get into a system that will not boot from the HD for some reason. But make sure the flash drive will mount all HDs it finds or be prepared to manually mount them after boot.to boot from a flash drive. Not sure that would be wise either.
My question is is this a 'wise' thing. If not, why not and what would be the better approach?
Mike,My experience with both Windows and Linux is: the more partitions the better. They not only allow you to organize all the files, but, more importantly, any maintenance that needs to be done will take a much shorter time. This is critical in Windows, but not so much in Linux. The Linux books I have also say it is good to separate /var and /temp as these are most likely to fill and separating them prevents the HD from being inadvertently filled. They also agree that, if ever needed, it is much easier to reinstall the system if you only have to clear the /boot, /usr and / partitions. Their recommendations are: /boot (about 50-100MB, depends mainly on the size of the kernel); /swap (twice the system RAM);/ (150-300MB); /usr (at least 300MB); /home (300MB for a single user is okay, but >500MB is better); /var (200-300MB); /temp (200-300MB). Putting the /boot, /, /usr partitions on one HD makes sense to me. All other mount points would be on other HDs. I have never heard or read of anyone advising one to get anything other than the largest HD they could for the money they have. Why would you want a 100MB SATA HD? Just for a small /boot? Partitioning the drive is as good as separate drives if all you're concerned about is the size of the /boot partition. More to the point, I have not seen any new SATA HD less than 80GB. You are swimming upstream (to say the least) if you want less than a GB of capacity in a SATA HD. Look at the $/GB for HDs and buy accordingly. LVM does not require multiple HDs, so 1.5TB divided into several partitions can still use LVM. LVM simply makes adding more HDs easy. Having more than one HD simply means that you only stand to lose the files on one HD at a time, instead of losing everything upon one failure. RAID is the only insurance against HD failure, but most agree that only servers really need RAID. Put your critical personal files and hardware drivers on a Flash drive, if nothing else.
Hope this helps.