How To: Partition your Hard Drive.

[scorp123]

Thanks. One other question, will there be a /boot for each Linux OS and does Grub reside in the boot?

Each Linux installation has its /boot directory, yes. So this can either just be a sub-directory in each of the root directories of each installation ... or if you really want it super complicated, you could create each /boot for each Linux installation as a separate partition and mount point. The big question is: How are you going to partition your harddisk then so that these things don't get into each other's way ?? (It can be done ... but it's not easy!!) Also, something that you need to think ahead of: The GRUB installation of the last Linux distribution you install is most likely the one that will take control of the Master Boot Record of your harddisk. So when the PC boots, you'll first see the GRUB of the last Linux distribution you installed. All other Linux installations should still be selectable as boot options. Regardless of this, you can still always overwrite the MBR's GRUB with a GRUB from your currently running distribution, regardless in which order it was installed. You'll just have to make sure that the /boot/grub/menu.lst you want to use is right about the various menu entries and that everything is selectable. Basically you can copy and paste the relevant sections of each menu.lst file from one distribution to another (ain't that cool or what?)

My partitioning scheme which I posted in this thread was assuming that one would only have one Linux as the main OS and a Windows installation somewhere (e.g. for the casual game here and there).

With multiple Linux installations things might be slightly more complicated. Let's take a 120 GB disk as basis and let's assume you would install up to three Linux distros on it (e.g. for evaluation purposes). Let's assume we're talking about these fine Linux distributions:

- openSuSE 10.2
- Linux Mint "Bianca"
- Fedora Core 6

So here we go:

/dev/hda1 -- 15 GB openSUSE 10.2, containing everything but /home
/dev/hda2 -- 15 GB Fedora Core 6, containing everything but /home
/dev/hda3 -- 15 GB Linux Mint, containing everything but /home
/dev/hda4 -- extended partition, from here to the end of the HD
/dev/hda5 -- ca. 75-78 GB shared /home between all three distros (user names could nontheless be different between the three; having the same user name on all three may create new problems eg. with incompatible settings in GNOME and KDE ... with the help of symbolic links stuff like documents, browser settings, etc. could still be shared easily between all three distros and user accounts!) ...Very important: Make sure you only format this partition the first time (e.g. during the installation of the first Linux distro you want to use) and then don't format it in all subsequent installations! Or else: bye bye oh beloved files, bye bye browser settings, bye bye e-mails ...
/dev/hda9 -- swap, whatever is left of the harddisk (e.g. 2 GB)

[kenetics]

¡Muchas gracias!
You answered a whole lot of questions!

[marcus0263]

You can slice up the drive to how ever fits your needs. For a "Desktop" workstation/home use I usually go this route.

/boot ext2 (128 Meg sufficient unless you have a number of kernels)
/ reiserfs (12 - 15 Gig)
/home reiserfs (rest of the free space)
swap swap (512 Meg sufficient)

If you have a number of large files like video I'd use XFS

Also for security reasons it is HIGHLY recommended not to have /boot mounted for example

/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 1

[scorp123]

/ reiserfs (12 - 15 Gig)

I'd stay away from ReiserFS ... It crashed several times on me and took all the data with it to Nirvana. If you want reliability I'd go with ext3 or XFS.

[marcus0263]

/ reiserfs (12 - 15 Gig)

I'd stay away from ReiserFS ... It crashed several times on me and took all the data with it to Nirvana. If you want reliability I'd go with ext3 or XFS.

I've been using Reiser for a few years and have never had a problem, it's pretty stable. SuSE uses it along with a few other distro's as their default FS. Reiser4 has a number of issues, but Reiser3 is pretty solid.

[clem]

Just a quick off-topic question Marcus. In your avatar: is that "tower" in Sydney or Seattle? It reminds me of something I've seen down under.. not to sure though.

Clem
you know those moments when you know you're about to say something obviously stupid ? I feel like that right now.. come on guys finish me

[kenetics]

It's the Seattle "Space Needle", built for the Seattle World's Fair in 1962.

It's actually only this big!

I'm sure Marcus will confirm this.

[clem]

ah.. here's the one I was thinking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Tower

Clem

[scorp123]

I've been using Reiser for a few years and have never had a problem, it's pretty stable.

You were just lucky

SuSE uses it along with a few other distro's as their default FS.

I always change it to ext3 or XFS. It was exactly on one of my SUSE servers where I once had a really bad crash. I never quite understood why it happened, it just came out of the blue. That day I lost 500 GB of data. Thank you Hans Reiser ... And besides: Novell/SUSE have dropped ReiserFS as their default filesystem! If you check their wikis and mailing lists they even advise against using it because of the increasing amount of strange stories where people like me lost gigabytes of data due to ReiserFS doing strange things ...

Thank the Gods I had a backup somewhere that day ... But for me ReiserFS is dead. I've heard other horror stories from other admin colleagues who had a similar bad experience. It appears that if your machine goes beyond a certain workload (as it could happen on a server!!) ReiserFS has the tendency to cripple its filesytems all of sudden. You get I/O read errors, you reboot, hoping that a fsck will fix the problem .... and BLAMMMO! your data is gone.

No thanks. If I wanted to lose data without apparent reason I'd be using Windoze.

[marcus0263]

Just a quick off-topic question Marcus. In your avatar: is that "tower" in Sydney or Seattle? It reminds me of something I've seen down under.. not to sure though.

Clem
you know those moments when you know you're about to say something obviously stupid ? I feel like that right now.. come on guys finish me

That's here in Seattle, actually I took the picture from my Apartment. I have to brag I've got a killer view of the Needle, Puget Sound, Mt. Rainer and the Olympic Mountains. No I'm not rich, I just got very lucky with this Apartment

[marcus0263]

I've been using Reiser for a few years and have never had a problem, it's pretty stable.

You were just lucky

SuSE uses it along with a few other distro's as their default FS.

I always change it to ext3 or XFS. It was exactly on one of my SUSE servers where I once had a really bad crash. I never quite understood why it happened, it just came out of the blue. That day I lost 500 GB of data. Thank you Hans Reiser ... And besides: Novell/SUSE have dropped ReiserFS as their default filesystem! If you check their wikis and mailing lists they even advise against using it because of the increasing amount of strange stories where people like me lost gigabytes of data due to ReiserFS doing strange things ...

Thank the Gods I had a backup somewhere that day ... But for me ReiserFS is dead. I've heard other horror stories from other admin colleagues who had a similar bad experience. It appears that if your machine goes beyond a certain workload (as it could happen on a server!!) ReiserFS has the tendency to cripple its filesytems all of sudden. You get I/O read errors, you reboot, hoping that a fsck will fix the problem .... and BLAMMMO! your data is gone.

No thanks. If I wanted to lose data without apparent reason I'd be using Windoze.

So far no problems, but if I was to go with another FS I'd use XFS.

But I've everything backed up to where all that I'd need to do is slice up the drives, extract the tarball then install grub. Simple recovery if needed.

But for server, I'd use XFS or what ever fit the bill.

[kenetics]

Scorp wrote:

/dev/hda1 -- 15 GB openSUSE 10.2, containing everything but /home
/dev/hda2 -- 15 GB Fedora Core 6, containing everything but /home
/dev/hda3 -- 15 GB Linux Mint, containing everything but /home
/dev/hda4 -- extended partition, from here to the end of the HD
/dev/hda5 -- ca. 75-78 GB shared /home between all three distros (user names could nontheless be different between the three; having the same user name on all three may create new problems eg. with incompatible settings in GNOME and KDE ... with the help of symbolic links stuff like documents, browser settings, etc. could still be shared easily between all three distros and user accounts!) ...Very important: Make sure you only format this partition the first time (e.g. during the installation of the first Linux distro you want to use) and then don't format it in all subsequent installations! Wink Or else: bye bye oh beloved files, bye bye browser settings, bye bye e-mails ... Wink
/dev/hda9 -- swap, whatever is left of the harddisk (e.g. 2 GB)

Following the above scheme, I used GParted to delete existing partitions, add and resize. I could not change the name of the existing extended partition, which is /dev/hda2. Does it matter? If so, how does one change partition names?

I wound up with:
/dev/hda1 -- 15 GB
/dev/hda3 -- 15 GB
/dev/hda4 -- 18 GB
/dev/hda2 -- extended partition, from here to the end of the HD
/dev/hda6 -- 62 GB shared /home
/dev/hda5 -- 2 GB swap

[scorp123]

Following the above scheme, I used GParted to delete existing partitions

It would be better if you deleted everything (if this is possible) and started from scratch. Having your partition numbers messed up could create problems later on. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, maybe not even next year. But one day it could. All it takes is a broken installer (e.g. the one from a Linux distro that you will want to try out in two years??) that messes up about the partition numberings or their order on the disk ... Been there, seen it happen

So it would be better to have everything tidy and in the right order.

[kenetics]

I managed to redo my partitions and got them in proper order. I mounted Mint / on: /dev/hda1 but the install program wouldn't let me leave /hda2 & /hda3 unmounted, So I mounted /usr & /var on them. Now, there's data in those partitions (I guess its done automatically) and I can't install other distros without messing up Mint. I guess I can uninstall Mint but I would be left with the same problem on a re-install. Can that data be moved to the root partition? Thanks again,

Ken

[kenetics]

I think I'll just delete /dev/hda1,2 & 3 and recreate hda1, reinstall Mint on hda1 and partition hda2 & 3 as needed. That should not interfere with the other partitions numbering. Does that sound logical?

[marcus0263]

I think I'll just delete /dev/hda1,2 & 3 and recreate hda1, reinstall Mint on hda1 and partition hda2 & 3 as needed. That should not interfere with the other partitions numbering. Does that sound logical?

Best advice is to have at least the minimum number of file systems of

/boot
/
/home

[kenetics]

What puzzles me is that when I installed Bea, I let it automatically partition the drive and it left me some partitions unmounted. But when I create the partitions manually, it wont let me install Mint and leave unmounted partitions. Just doesn't make sense to me, but then a lot of things don't!

[marcus0263]

What puzzles me is that when I installed Bea, I let it automatically partition the drive and it left me some partitions unmounted. But when I create the partitions manually, it wont let me install Mint and leave unmounted partitions. Just doesn't make sense to me, but then a lot of things don't!

Interesting, I don't think I've seen that. I've never had an issue with unmounted file systems.

BTW I never do the "automatic", it's usually pretty ugly.

[scorp123]

BTW I never do the "automatic", it's usually pretty ugly.

Oh yes. Better to do it manually ...

[crusti]

Kenetics,

Regarding the issue of trying to leave partitions unmounted:

In gParted right after you finalize your actual partitions, you go to the next step to decide which partition is mounted at which mount point and check off which should be re-formatted (make sure you have a file system on the partitions at this point, otherwise you'll get an error). Here's the trick: In order to get Mint to ignore a partition, you have to delete the proposed mount point and blank out the partition entry. (It's annoying because I have so many partitions.)

hda has 3 partitions:
hda1 / for my main Debian OS
hda2 swap
hda3 /home
We now know this is not the recommended setup.

hdb has 10 partitions:
hdb1 / for another Debian
hdb2 swap for Debian
hdb3 /home
hdb5 / for openSUSE 10.2
hdb6 / for Ubuntu 6.10
hdb7 / for Linux Mint Bea
hdb8 swap for 5, 6, 7, 9, 10
hdb9 / for Linux Mint Bianca
hdb10 currently empty

hdc has 1 partition:
hdc1 /woc 160GB of Wide Open Country

So when I installed Bianca, I had to delete lots of suggested mount points.
I distilled my list to just this:
/dev/hdb9 /
/dev/hdb8 swap
/dev/hdb3 /home

All of the remaining entries were deleted so Bianca would ignore them and wouldn't tell me I had unmounted partitions.

This topic leads right into a suggestion about newbie mounting schemes: How easy is it for an installer to accept a SINGLE partition rather than a single hard drive as the chosen install location, and then the installer re-partitions this single partition into scorp123's recommended scheme of /boot, /, /usr, [/opt,] [/srv,] /var, /home. Newbies don't necessarily want to know about how linux should be organized when they're just getting started, but they also may not have an entire hard drive to devote to linux.

Cheers,
crusti