Re: [linuxiran] Best Partitioning Scheme

[Aryan Ameri]

On Monday 29 December 2003 21:10, ocean wrote:
> Hi
>
> I finally bought my laptop!
> It's a compaq presario 2523.(40 GB HDD, 448 MB, 2.66
> GHtz)
> Now before getting down to installing linux( though on
> her second boot I tried Knoppix 3.3 on it) and
> considering that it is fully mine( not sharing it with
> any one else) I'd like to know your suggestions on
> creating a good partitioning scheme for installing at
> least two linux distros(1 for certain RH9 and the
> other a debain(based) distro).
>
> Thanks in advance

Others have replied to this. I am going to mostly agree with what they 
wrote.

However, you only get the best partitioning scheme with experience. I 
formated and re-formated by partition scheme at least a dozen times, 
untill at last I settled on  something which I am now happy with.


First of all, it is always good to have a seperate partition for your 
own personal files. Somewhere that you can put your pictures, music, 
books, ... other stuff in it. /home is for this porpuse, however my 
experience shows that /home doesn't work very well in this regard. 
Because aside from your own files, many other files and directores 
(like user configuration files) are also stored in /home. Moreover each 
distro wants to customize /home/fooUser so if you share /home among 
different distros, they get cluttered, and the end result is a mess.

I have a seperate partition, for all my personal files. It is somehow 
like /home. It is the biggest partition of my HDD, (in my case it 
contains around %60 of my HDD) and I always mount it as /data. This 
makes life very simple, what ever distro, or Unix-like OS that I use, I 
only have to mount that partition as /data and then all my files will 
be there.

Someone suggested to seperate as much as you can. He e.g said it's good 
to put /tmp, /var and etc on different partitions. Although theoretcaly 
this is true, and for servers it is a neccessity, I never do this for a 
desktop system. I ofcourse have a specific situation. I usually have 
7-8 different distros and OSes installed on my box, so if I want to 
have a separate /var for all of them, then things will get so cluttered 
that I won't be able to read my fstab file anymore. Therefore, I only 
suggest that you separate /boot and / from each other, and put 
everything else inside /. You of course should have a separate swap, 
which different distros can share, and you can have a separate /tmp 
which again different distros can share. But never share things like /
var or /usr cause they are distro dependent.

My /boot is usually around 60 MB to 70 MB. I don't know how Arash can 
live with a 30 MB /boot, because my /boot is ususally filled 80% of the 
time, and I do not compile kernels every day. 

Your swap shouldn't be more than twice your RAM, cause the system will 
be able to only use that much. (unless you are doing specific 
scientific things) I advice you to set your swap twice your RAM. no 
more than that.

In case you are interested, here is my partition table:

dev/hda1           /boot primary distro
/dev/hda2          /data
/dev/hda3          / primary distro
/dev/hda4          Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5          BeOS
/dev/hda6          FreeBSD
/dev/hda7          /boot second distro
/dev/hda8          / second distro
/dev/hda9          /boot third distro
/dev/hda10        / third distro
/dev/hda11        /boot fourth distro
/dev/hda12        /fourth distro
/dev/hda13       swap

My £0.02 

Cheers

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Aryan Ameri