How To: Partition your Hard Drive.

[Matti L]

I used to have a separate home partition, but now I only have / and swap because all my important files are on windows partition or separate hard drives and settings for Firefox and Chromium and synced with Firefox Sync and Gmail. I have 1 gb of swap in the end of the hd, but it's rarely used at all.

[scorp123]

all my important files are on windows partition

Sounds like a recipe for disaster

Just a few hours ago I could witness how a oh-so-rock-stable Windows 2008 R2 server crashed. Too bad it was that particular customer's file server and it had a few unique files .... But now? Not anymore. The disks were utterly and completely corrupted. Bye bye unique files.

And I don't hate Microsoft at all. In fact Microsoft makes selling Unix- and Linux-based products and services so easy lately ....

[Matti L]

Just a few hours ago I could witness how a oh-so-rock-stable Windows 2008 R2 server crashed. Too bad it was that particular customer's file server and it had a few unique files .... But now? Not anymore. The disks were utterly and completely corrupted. Bye bye unique files.

Hehe... that's why you have to have more than one backup place and why USB and NAT hd's are great. On my previous Compaq laptop the hard drive broke down and I lost everything on it and it only had Ubuntu on it, but when someone makes a good working ext4 or btfrs driver for Windows then I'll keep everything on the Linux partitions.

[scorp123]

but when someone makes a good working ext4 or btfrs driver for Windows then I'll keep everything on the Linux partitions.

You could put your files on a NAS with a set of mirrored disks? If one fails, you still have the other disks. And those home NAS solutions one can buy or build one-self these days (e.g. FreeNAS) are able to offer SMB-access for Windows and Mac OS X, so exchanging files between platforms _AND_ keeping them safe should be easy these days. I myself use a PC which has Solaris 11 Express on it. The filesystem is ZFS. And I regularly take ZFS snapshots of everything. If something fails or accidentally gets deleted I simply rollback that folder to a point in time when the file was still around. Works pretty much like Apple's time machine and it's rock-solid.

[Matti L]

Yes, I've read a lot of RAID configurations and something like this would be nice to have:
LinkStation Pro Quad LS-QVL/R5

Right now I just don't have much of files (just 6gb of music) to backup so I don't need much. That ZFS snapshot thing sounds interesting too. I'll read more about it later.

[scorp123]

That ZFS snapshot thing sounds interesting too.

You can get ZFS in various BSD-based distros too. If you want to build a pure storage solution that keeps your data safe, then maybe FreeNAS might be worth a look?

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/reviews/freenas-8-review/

[MaddawgTL]

I need a bit of advice,I have a netbook and want to partition it correctly. Is it possible to repartition the hd without a reinstall? If so what would be a good setup for it? I would like to be able to try other linux distros out without a using flash drives. So a swap file of 1.5 gigs,20 gigs for mint,5 or 10gigs for trial os and rest data /home or am I still missing something here?

[sagirfahmid3]

Is it possible to repartition the hd without a reinstall? If so what would be a good setup for it? I would like to be able to try other linux distros out without a using flash drives. So a swap file of 1.5 gigs,20 gigs for mint,5 or 10gigs for trial os and rest data /home or am I still missing something here?

Yes, it's possible to repartition without reinstalling. When you get on the 4th step when installing Mint, click on "Advanced" or "Something else", then resize the big partition and make these partitions that you listed: "So a swap file of 1.5 gigs,20 gigs for mint,5 or 10gigs for trial os and rest data /home." Basically, you need a "/"root and a "linux-swap" partition, but you can make more if you want to be extra safe.

[eyjay1991]

Hey there. Ok i decided to repartition my 80GB Desktop. Currently it has a Win 7 OS, but will dual boot with XP and Mint.

Actually i read all from page 1 and i gather that the simplest install for home use only is :

/dev/sda1 / 10GB
/dev/sda2 /home (Rest of the Drive)
/dev/sda3 /swap (Size of my RAM which is 2GB)

Where then can i put my XP Install?

Here is my scenario in mind. I will dual boot XP and Mint, and they say install Windows 1st. I want to have a partition where XP and Mint share files, like Music/Documents/Pictures/Video/ETC

So how can i do that? .

Can i do this in Mint Live CD? Repartioning?

[sagirfahmid3]

I want to have a partition where XP and Mint share files, like Music/Documents/Pictures/Video/ETC

Can't do that. Linux's uses the ext2/3/4 filesystem; Windows cannot see those partitions. Linux, however, CAN see Windows partitions. What you would need to do is mount the Windows partition on startup (autostart). To see Linux partitions on Windows, you need a program called ext2explore which you can find on Sourceforge.

[srs5694]

I want to have a partition where XP and Mint share files, like Music/Documents/Pictures/Video/ETC

Can't do that.

This is incorrect.

Linux's uses the ext2/3/4 filesystem; Windows cannot see those partitions. Linux, however, CAN see Windows partitions. What you would need to do is mount the Windows partition on startup (autostart). To see Linux partitions on Windows, you need a program called ext2explore which you can find on Sourceforge.

It's true that Windows can't natively read Linux filesystems; however, a cross-OS file-sharing partition is easily created -- just create a separate partition and use a filesystem that both OSes can understand, such as FAT or NTFS. (I favor FAT, since Linux's support for it is faster and more reliable; however, FAT's got a 2 GiB file-size limit that can be a serious problem, so you may need to use NTFS. Other filesystems are options, too, if you provide a suitable Windows driver.)

To use the data-sharing filesystem, you'd access it directly wherever you mount it (you can decide on where that is). If you want to have conventional subdirectories of your home directory point there, you can use symbolic links.

I advise against providing Linux direct access to the Windows boot partition. Linux's NTFS-3g driver is unlikely to be as reliable as Microsoft's own NTFS driver, so giving Linux read/write access to the Windows C: partition can do nothing but increase the risk of serious disk problems. Furthermore, you might accidentally damage files from Linux that Windows would prevent you from touching. IMO, using a separate data-sharing partition is the way to go for best safety.

[sagirfahmid3]

*facepalm*...I knew it, but forgot to tell that.

[iain_j]

Hello you very helpful people

I'm on the verge of wiping my Vista system and installing Mint, and I've been trawling this forum for tips, today in particular about partitioning. I would have left the installer to do its default, with a swap and / partition, but now I'm planning:

Swap - 4Gb (to allow hibernation)
/ - 10Gb (including /home)
Documents, Music, Pictures, etc. - sizes to be decided, to be mounted into appropriate folders under /home/iain

My question is, is there an equivalent in Linux of Windows' "users\all users" folder that I can mount partitions to? To start with there'll only be one user (me) but if I add any more I'd like them to have access to the Music partition without mapping into each user's home folder.

[sagirfahmid3]

You can make the music folder so its readable by all users, no worries.

[iain_j]

Thanks sagirfahmid3

What I'm trying to figure out, is where would be a logical place to mount such a partition? Firstly I was wondering if there's an "all users" folder under /home as per Windows, then I was going along the lines of mounting it under /media, until I read about anything here being under root ownership.

Apologies for my nooby ignorance, I'm used to putting everything somewhere within the Windows "users" folder.

[sagirfahmid3]

Hmm, then you would be better off just creating a separate partition for music (preferably NTFS because it's readable by both Windows and Linux--also because it has lesser file-system overhead, so you will have MORE disk space than you would if you used ext2/3/4 filesystem).

You could automount that NTFS partition after installing ntfs-config (sudo apt-get install ntfs-config). You must run the program as root.
Terminal> sudo ntfs-config

Make sure to check the box that says "readable" only (unless you want other users to use up space without your permission).

[Lord High Warlock]

I hope it's alright to kinda hijack this thread...

I'm going to be installing Mint 13 on a 750GB hard drive (the Windows 7 partition will be entirely scrubbed) with 6GB of RAM. Should I just let Mint create its own partitions, or should I use a more specific configuration?

While I'm extremely familiar with Windows Partitions, I'm somewhat lacking in the Linux / Unix environments.