My partition scheme for Helena when installing

[mzsade]

Hi, I have surfed extensively on this forum, and elsewhere for optimal partition schemes, and even though i could grasp only some of technical aspects and logic underlying the various schemes, this is the scheme that i have prepared in anticipation of the release, for installation of Helena on my 160 GB HDD. I have hoped to have made provisions for max. stability and speed, installation of a new release every 6 months, frequent installation (and removal) of new apps, and possible fragmentation. I would greatly appreciate any corrections and refinements that the more experienced members here would care to apply to it:
Partition Mount Point Size File type
sda1 swap 2 GB
sda2 /boot 256 MB Ext 2
sda3 LM 8 / 15 GB Ext4
sda4 /home rest Ext 3

[viking777]

I wouldn't have a seperate /home partition, have a seperate /data partition instead. Leave /home on the main partition. A seperate /home may make it easier to reinstall, providing you are reinstalling EXACTLY the same version of Linux Mint, but why would you? Mint is stable enough to last for ages without reinstallation unless you seriously screw with it and unlike windows it doesn't slow up with time so why would you need to reinstall it. If you do need to reinstall then a recent disc image is by far the best way. What a seperate /home partition won't do is to make it easier to upgrade - in my experience it will make it more difficult. Think installing Windows Vista over the registry for XP it is kinda similar though not quite as impossible!

One other thing I would do as well is to leave some free space somewhere on the disk and when you have finished installing Mint install another Linux distro there (or even a different version of Mint if you like it that much) That way if you do run into problems with Mint you can simply boot the second distro and carry on as normal since it will be able to access your seperate /data partition with ease but if you try and make it run from a shared /home partition I can almost guarantee you will run into problems as there will be so many conflicts. You can also use the second distro to fix the first if you need to - and it is more fun

[mzsade]

Thanks for replying to a topic that has already been done to death; i get the reservations for having a /home partition for the rest of the disk space, only problem as far as i am concerned is, creation and mounting of a data partition during installation, (to the best of my knowledge there is no mount point for it, how do i create it then?).
As to Colonel Schell's requirement of providing for installation of Slackware, etc. i suggest an additional /usr partition, but then the number of primary partitions would exceed 4, and that would entail the creation of an extended and logical partition (i hope i am on the right track this far--a few words of wisdom would really help here, Fred!).

[viking777]

Thanks for replying to a topic that has already been done to death; i get the reservations for having a /home partition for the rest of the disk space, only problem as far as i am concerned is, creation and mounting of a data partition during installation, (to the best of my knowledge there is no mount point for it, how do i create it then?).
As to Colonel Schell's requirement of providing for installation of Slackware, etc. i suggest an additional /usr partition, but then the number of primary partitions would exceed 4, and that would entail the creation of an extended and logical partition (i hope i am on the right track this far--a few words of wisdom would really help here, Fred!).

You don't create it at during installation you create it later. Just leave free space for it. Then use gparted when Mint has been installed to create a new partition. Looking at your proposed partition scheme gparted would probably create it as /dev/sda4 (assuming you didn't create the home partition). You then open /etc/fstab as root (right click it in nautilus select open as root) and you add a line something like this:

Code: Select all

/dev/sda4  /media/data ext3 defaults 0 0

Lastly you open /media as root and you elect to create a new folder called - data - . Since you will want to access this as a normal user you right click on it select properties and change both the user and group to your username/group. You then copy all your 'data' into it and you are done.

I should add that this is only guesswork on my part since I don't find it necessary to have even a separate data folder I put everything on one partition - except swap.

[mzsade]

You don't create it at during installation you create it later. Just leave free space for it. Then use gparted when Mint has been installed to create a new partition.

Aha!..thanks, that's exactly what i was fuzzy about. As to the procedure, i will have to actually perform it in actual practice before i feel confident about what i am doing. So then, this is how 'it has been written, and this is how it shall be done', at installation:

sda1 >> swap >> 2GB
sda2 >> /boot >> 256 MB
sda3 LM8 >> / >> 15GB
>> Unpartitioned/free space >> rest

Right??

[mzsade]

Wrong, from what i have now learned after some more head-banging..if i am to satisfy my criteria of max. speed, possibility of frequent installs and removals of packages, frequent rewriting, it would have to be /swap, /boot, /usr, /opt, /var, /tmp (where i will also process my downloads before moving them to data), /home and finally / (root) for my main install, in that order. Also, the problem with creating a data partition later is that the unallocated space will be at the end of the drive and i read somewhere that the root should optimally be the last partition. So unless you tell me that a new release install or upgrade will automatically wipe replace my old /home, which i will be using to store my data, with a new one, i think this will do, or won't it??? Also i am still not clear about which of these should/will be primary, and which will be logical/extended.

[viking777]

Sorry, I can't help you then. I personally think partitioning schemes like that are nonsense. But that is just one opinion of many, you don't have to listen to anything I say, if that is what you want then go for it.

[mzsade]

There now, i seem to have miffed you! Perhaps i had better explain my overly zealous planning for a 'perfect install'. My entire PC experience, not just Linux, is of not more than 2 1/2 years, of that Windows takes about a year, so there are not very many Windows habits that i have to unlearn. I am not much of a distro-hopper, wrestled with Ubuntu for almost a year till i discovered Mint. I really believe that i have found an OS that i can be with for life, and even if it is not capable now of performing all the tasks that all the other OSs can, if you combine all their abilities together, it is on the road to getting there. I even played around with Mint KDE for a bit, found it awesome, by the way, but i will never be as comfortable with it as i am with Gnome. Hence this desperate need to get my future installation right in every way, with the assumption that i am not going to have anything to do with any other distro, and that all i will be doing is installing, or upgrading to, the new release about every 6 months. So don't be pissed, friend, bear with me, do correct me where i am wrong, and tell me if installing a new release will wipe out my old /home and all the data in it (if i install it in the root partition, and leave the rest of the partitions as they were in my 'scheme')--i.e. whenever you find the time to visit this forum, and deal with stupid questions.

[viking777]

Pissed? Miffed?

Good Lord no!

I didn't mean to give you that impression at all. Sorry if I did.

Partition away to your hearts content, I really mean it - I am not being sarcastic, I hope it works for you.

[mzsade]

All's well then, but if you really mean it, do me the kindness of correcting my stupid little partition scheme, would you?

[viking777]

I can't correct it my friend. I have never used a partitioning scheme like that so I don't know anything about it. I am sure if you got it from the Mint wiki it will be alright.

[mzsade]

Okay, the screenshot is what my partition table looks like. I went to partition editor, created a new ext3 partition in the unallocated space and labelled it data. When i went to Nautilus, i found it as 126GB media named data. Now this contained a locked 'lost & found' directory which i could not open. So i did a chmod u+x on it and created a sub-folder called "rest". However, when i tried to copy the files from my backup DVD into it i found that i lacked the permissions. So i tried a chmod u+x on it, this time it didn't work (why?) Next, i right-clicked it and opened it as root, changed permissions, and then pasted the contents of my backup DVD into it. So far so good, i have now reclaimed my unallocated space and am able to read/write into it. Any advice and corrections as to the procedure i followed up to this point would be most welcome.

Now the final hurdle: How do i convert the hash that i have made of my system into a well ordered and located partition scheme where my extended partition is changed to a primary partition and /dev/sda6 becomes /dev/sda1, /dev/sda7 becomes /dev/sda2, and my root install /dev/sda5 becomes /dev/sda3 and they are all contiguous as a whole?

[mzsade]

Just couldn't leave it alone, could i? Found a Remastersys .deb package, made a full back-up and custom iso, reinstalled. Look how neat it looks!
sade@sade-desktop ~ $ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xed122b18

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 243 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 244 17021 134769285 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 * 17022 19457 19567170 83 Linux
sade@sade-desktop ~ $