Re: About to format the whole laptop, need some partitioning advice.
On 02/04/2014 10:33 PM, Anubhav Yadav wrote:
I have an Asus laptop, with 720 gigs hardisk and i5 processor.
Right now I have a dual boot of Windoze ... and debian wheezy 64 bit.
Debian takes a lots of time for booting up ...
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.
I'll assume you've backed up everything on that HDD.
Most major hard drive manufacturers offer drive diagnostic tools.
Download the tool for your brand of HDD and use it to check your drive.
(I prefer a stand-alone bootable ISO image that I can burn to CD.)
Also download a hard drive benchmarking tool, run it, and save the
results to files (and back those up). You will then have a baseline to
make comparisons against.
> some people also suggested that my partitions are somehow not right.
> Here is the screenshot of my current partitions.
> http://i.imgur.com/YI4a1oU.png
Multiple scattered partitions on a HDD are non-optimal and can be a
performance (and lifetime) problem, depending upon usage.
Do you know if the drive has 512 B (2**9) or 4 KiB (2**12) blocks? If 4
KiB, are the partitions aligned to 4 KiB boundaries? If not, that will
cause problems.
So now since I am about to partition I would like to know what should
be the ideal partitioning scheme.
So these are the questions:
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.
I'd suggest that you check and wipe the drive using the manufacturer
diagnostic, dedicate the entire drive to one OS (I'd pick Windows), and
let the OS installer partition and format the entire drive using
defaults. Use desktop virtualization (VirtualBox, VMware, etc.) for
other OS's.
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?
Your drive hasn't lost any sectors.
Electrical engineering/ computer science people used to define GB as
2**30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes.
Marketing people noticed that the metric system defined "Giga" (G) as
1.0E+09 = 1,000,000,000 (1 billion), so now hard drive and system
manufacturers use that convention because the number that people see is
bigger (because the units are smaller).
EE/CS people are now starting to use GiB for 2**30 bytes.
The screenshot shows "/dev/sda 698.64 GiB", which I interpret as 698.64
* 2**30 bytes =~ 750 GB.
HTH,
David
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