Re: About to format the whole laptop, need some partitioning advice.
On Wednesday, February 05, 2014 08:27:15 AM David Guntner wrote:
> Zenaan Harkness grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
> > On 2/5/14, Anubhav Yadav <anubhav1691@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>[...]
> >>
> > Nowadays, the only partitions I use are:
> > /boot - about 1GiB
>
> Unless you're planning on having a lot of different kernels installed,
> you really don't need a full gig for /boot (it doesn't hurt anything,
> though).
>
Heck, unless you plan to multiboot with other Linux/Unix-likes there's little
point in a separate /boot EXCEPT possibly as a way to keep your machine
booting if you remove Linux (Probably better to just reinstall the Windows
boot manager.).
> > / - root partition, the rest
>
> How Windowsian of you. :-)
>
> > 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 at least) for having multiple partitions are no longer valid (separate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.
>
> It's not just a matter of capacity. I've got a 1TB drive, and I still
>
> partition them into separate sections:
> > $ df -k
> > Filesystem 1K-blocks Used
> > Available Use% Mounted on rootfs
> > 1818872 299704 1426704 18% / udev
> > 10240 0 10240 0% /dev tmpfs
> > 309540 12812 296728
> > 5% /run /dev/disk/by-uuid/36f6b922-0e9a-4ce5-aeee-c92104fa2428 1818872
> > 299704 1426704 18% / tmpfs
> > 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock tmpfs
> > 1049560 0 1049560 0%
> > /run/shm /dev/sda1 137221
> > 20211 109689 16% /boot /dev/sda12
> > 67284600 16339432 47527264 26% /home /dev/sdb1
> > 307665016 40081124 251955400 14% /backup
> > /dev/sda9 28835836 351612
> > 27019444 2% /opt /dev/sda6
> > 2882592 69908 2666252 3% /tmp /dev/sda7
> > 28835836 7400256 19970800 28% /usr /dev/sda8
> > 48060296 15360908 30258020
> > 34% /usr/local /dev/sda10
> > 28835836 1455184 25915872 6% /var /dev/sda11
> > 28835836 179364 27191692 1% /var/spool>
> >> 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?
>
> Can't speak for him, but for me it's a segmenting issue. If I have to
> wipe / for example, I'm not wiping things in /usr or /usr/local (where
> my locally-installed programs go) unless I have to, or even /home. Of
> course, there's no reason to want to protect /home from an install that
> wants to format the / partition, right? :-)
>
Separate /usr is unneeded and actually complicates boot for little benefit.
Most Linux distributions rely on /usr being present before the end of the
early userspace. Preserving /usr between installations is a bad idea because
you'll have all your software MINUS any information on any of it being
installed available to your package manager. This means one reinstall later
you're basically stopped from even upgrading most of it, can't remove it with
the manager, etc.
Separate /home is a must for me, though. That's the number one thing to
persist between not only installations, but machines. Best thing to put on a
dedicated hard disk if you can.
> >> 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).
>
> Don't forget, the capacity they list is the full, complete capacity of
> the drive - not the usable amount of space. You always lose some to
> formatting information, etc.
>
> --Dave
Conrad
Reply to: