Installing with 2 hard drives HELP

[Aging Technogeek]

youdkelon:

You are likely going to get as many different partition schemes as there are members of this forum. Everybody seems to do it slightly differently. I can tell you what works best for me and if you don't like it, just wait a few hours and you will have many choices.

First - swap
Should be equal to or slightly larger than ram - up to a swap+ram = 4 gigabytes(approximately). On a laptop, if you want to be able to hibernate, swap must be equal to or
larger than ram.

Second - / (root)
about 10 - 12 gig should be adequate for most users.

Third - /home
Whatever size you think you will require for your data files and documents.


Remember when partitioning that small, tight installs on the outside of the hard disk (the left side of the partition diagram or the top of the partition table) will boot and run faster than sprawling whole disk installs like you usually get with the automatic partitioner. Always use manual partitioning if available. In fact, you may want yo download and burn a disk with the most recent version of Gparted so you will always have the manual partition option.

Almost forgot- Linux expects to have a swap partition. If you have 3 gig or more of ram you can probably go with a minimal swap of about 256 megabytes but do not eliminate the swap partition entirely.

Also- don't feel that you must partition your entire drive at one time . Set up a partition scheme that gives you the room you think you will need and leave the rest of the drive as unallocated space. You can always increase the size of your partitions with Gparted if you need more room. (eg. I'm dual booting Mint 6 main and Mint 6 XFCE from a 640 Gib drive and only using about 30 gigs)

<edited 4/2 - corrected error pointed out by AKDave>

[AK Dave]

First - swap
Should be equal to or slightly larger than ram - up to a swap+ram = 4 gigabytes(approximately). On a laptop, if you want to be able to suspend, swap must be equal to or
larger than ram.

You're thinking hibernate. You can suspend without swap, but you need swap=ram (at a minimum) to hibernate because the hibernate file is saved to swap. You may need MORE swap than ram if you hibernate at a state where your swap is already heavily used for swapping.

But you don't need swap to suspend.

All else is good.

[dlkreations]

For me personally, I have my partitioning scheme as follows on my laptop which houses a 320GiB hard drive.

Swap = 256MB (I have 4GB of RAM installed in my system)

/Boot = 256MB - formatted to ext2

Everything else is formatted to ext3

/ (root) = 20GB which should give me more than enough space for my OS to grow

/home = 25GB

/home/Pictures = 25GB

/home/Documents = 25GB

/home/Downloads = 25GB

/home/Music = 150GB ( I have a lot of music!)

/home/Videos = 25GB

Then whatever I have left over, I can put to use at a later time.

Most partitioning schemes are generally personal preference, as long as you set your partitions in the correct order (i.e. having the most accessed partitions at the beginning of the drive). There's a very informative thread HERE written by Fred if you need any other tips to help you in your decisions to partitioning.

Since you have 2 drives in your system, it's basically all up to you as to how you really want to set it up. Good luck!

[Akanbe]

Why install different partitions for /, /home, etc?

I've seen them in gparted and always just used /, not realizing the other parts were useful as well. What would be the benefits of doing like the above posters mentioned?

[Aging Technogeek]

AK Dave:

Thanks for the correction. You are right of course. I must have had a brain fart .

youdkelon:

Definitely follow dlkreations advice and visit Fred's thread. It is probably the bast possible way to really understand partitioning and installation.

Akanbe:

If you have your entire install in / and you have to reinstall, you will lose all data and settings. With separate partitions you can save your files and just reinstall the OS.

[emorrp1]

I've experimented with numerous different partitioning schemes, but I seem to have settled on this one, and it's now fairly stable:
0) everything formatted to ext3, and all inside a single logical partition (I do not use Windows)
1) I keep data (e.g. Documents, Pictures, Video folders) on a separate /media/data partition, so it can be available for every distro I want to install.
2) I keep /home, containing only it's config files (not data) on its own partition, so re-installing the same distro will keep all my config settings.
3) I use a separate /home for each distro (and version of distro) I install. Each distro uses it's own software versions and configurations can conflict if in the same place. Another way to circumvent the issue would be to use different usernames for each distro.

sda (80GB internal laptop drive):
sda5 | /boot | 98.7MiB | 45%
sda6 | / | 9.8GiB | 59% (just install UT ~9%)
sda7 | swap | 2.0GiB | 0% (+2GB ram)
sda8 | /home | 4.9GiB | 13%
sda9 | /usr/local | 19.7GiB | 44% (where I install neverwinter nights)
sda10 | /os/test | 4.9GiB | 2% (where I install any distros I want to check my hardware on)
sda11 | /os/virt | 31.9GiB | 0% (where I'll put virtualbox files which ease distro-hopping)

sdb (500GB external hard-drive)
sdb1 | /media/data | 462.1GiB | 18%

The first thing I do after installing a new distro is to remove all it's auto-created folders in /home, and create symlinks to corresponding folders in /media/data

[mipcar]

The first thing I do after installing a new distro is to remove all it's auto-created folders in /home, and create symlinks to corresponding folders in /media/data

Can you please explain that action a bit more?

Thanks,
Mychael

[emorrp1]

Ok, I'll assume you already have a setup similar to mine; i.e. the separate data partition with corresponding folders. If not, just adjust appropriately, ask for more help if you need. The following is in a script I use:

Code: Select all

rmdir ~/*
mkdir ~/Desktop
ln -s /media/data/Downloads ~
ln -s /media/data/Documents ~
ln -s /media/data/Projects ~
ln -s /media/data/Camera ~/Pictures
ln -s /media/data/Camera ~/Videos
ln -s /media/data/Audio ~/Music

As an explanation, the rmdir will remove all empty folders in the home directory. You need the Desktop folder, otherwise it's a pain to bring back if you want it later, so mkdir re-creates it. The symlink syntax is:

Code: Select all

ln -s /path/to/real/dir /path/to/fake/dir

If the fake dir specified already exists, the link will be named after the real dir inside that folder, like in the first 3 cases. If it does not exist, a new link will be created with the given name, as in the final 3 cases. Notice that I can make two fake dirs point to the same real dir, as in the Camera cases. /media/data should be the permanent mount point of your data dir, check /etc/fstab if you're not sure. Again, if you need any more help, let me know.

[willxtreme]

nice solution emorrp1

[pewterbot9]

If you have your entire install in / and you have to reinstall, you will lose all data and settings.

Not if you regularly backup your home folder to an external source (DVD platter, external hard drive, or flash drive for examples). After a new install, you can copy the backed-up home folder to your main hard drive.