Re: About to format the whole laptop, need some partitioning advice.

[Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>]

On 2/5/14, Anubhav Yadav <anubhav1691@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> I have an Asus laptop, with 720 gigs hardisk and i5 processor.
> Right now I have a dual boot of Windoze (only for playing fifa
> and assassins creed) and debian wheezy 64 bit.

> Here is the screenshot of my current partitions.
> http://i.imgur.com/YI4a1oU.png

I used to use multiple partitions as you do.

Nowadays, the only partitions I use are:
/boot - about 1GiB
/ - root partition, the rest

This way, it's really simple, and the old reasons (for most home users
at least) for having multiple partitions are no longer valid (separate
backups, making sure /root does not fill up, etc), since the HDDs are
so capacious.

> There was a tool which gave the read-write speeds of my hdd,
> that was mentioned by the guys in irc, I cant remember now, and
> the speeds were very low.

Sounds like you might have some other problem though. Your current
partition setup should not be a _performance_ problem as far as I can
tell, although I would consider it a disk flexibility problem for
sure.

If you really want multiple partitions (besides a separate /boot) then
LVM is your friend - and it future or if you're adventurous, BTRFS
instead.

> 1) What partitioning scheme should I choose now, If I want to have
> /home, /var, /usr, /tmp on different partitions and I just want a windoze
> partition of 50-60 gb.

But WHY do you want them on separate partitions? XY problem?

> 2) As you can see in the screenshot, gparted shows that the hdd is
> only 698 gb whereas when purchased it was 720 GB. Any ways to recover
> the lost sectors back?

You "lost" none - 700,000,000,000 bytes is the correct and advertised
size of the drive, as sold.

2^10^3 bytes is one GiB
10^9 bytes is a "GB" or the term used for advertising (historical, too
much momentum to change it nowadays it seems).

> Please pardon me If I am not allowed to post link to images!

fdisk -l /dev/sda
might have been better. But the link is OK.

Good luck
Zenaan