Would you please post the detailed steps on how to do this?

The actual controls of the partitioner will vary greatly from distro to distro, so you should consult the documentation for that. The gist of it is you create partitions on your hard drive, including one for personal files. That particular partition is assigned the mount point /home and whenever any file is written to /home it goes on that partition.

Much has been said about filesystems, so I'll not explain them in great detail. You can get more information and even more opinions then you ever wanted simply by curling up in from of keyboard on a rainy afternoon with your favorite snack and beverage and entering "best Linux filesystem" in your search engine of choice.

I personally am a fan of journaled filesystems and use ext3 for /boot and ReiserFS for anything else. I have a single CPU with a single core. I've been told XFS is better for SMP purposes, and it was from someone who always has good advice, so I'll probably give it a shot on my dual Xeon core duo system currently in planning stages.

As far as partition layouts go, it works like this:

Here is a hypothetical hard drive:

ATA device A. [ ] 240gb

If you are using one large partition, it looks like this:

ATA device A. [ LINUX primary 240 GB ] 240gb

Of course, most people use swap space, thus 2 partitions: it looks like this:

ATA device A. [ LINUX primary 239GB | SWAP primary 1.0GB ] 240GB

While not always required (depends on distro) It's usually a good idea to have a separate boot partition, so we have 3 partitions in the next example:

ATA device A.
[/boot primary 256mb |LINUX primary ~238.75gb |SWAP primary 1gb] 240GB

The above example is typical of a home desktop system without a separate home partition, sizes of course vary and it is meant as a loose example and not a guideline. (so please no trolls telling me 256mb is too much for boot or 1gb isn't enough swap or vise vera, it's not meant to be precise)

Now, with a separate home partition, the contents of /home go on, as it must be obvious by now: a separate partition. Keep in mind, however, you can only have 3 primary partitions. Typically, at least; there are situations where there may be more, or may be less, allowed. We will assume our system allows us 3 per drive, so we must utilize extended partitions to accomplish what we want.

ATA device A.

[/boot pri 256mb |Linux pri 20gb|swap pri 1gb|extended area ~218.75gb]
{extnd part 1 /home ~218.75}

The above allows a separate /home, the purpose of which is to keep your personal files apart from the operating system. In a case where casual experimentation as root leads you to a system so broken you can't even begin to find out what went wrong where, you simply reformat your / partition and /home remains safe.

There are of course many, many variations including those where Windows is involved, hardware or software RAID arrays, hardware limitations, and so on.

I hope this explains the process of using multiple partitions somewhat.
As we are getting off topic, you may considering posting a thread in one of the main forums to explore this further.

Best of luck

K

opensuse4life gave a very nice write-up on the subject. The key is in his/her first sentence of the first paragraph.

For the rest I'll find an area here and point you to it. A little off topic here.

OK, Done: Using a separate /home partition. Lets talk, opensusie4life, come join us. Loved your post!

Have a nice day.
Bruce

I use a little different partitioning scheme: the /
partition should not be so large and do not waste primary partitions for SWAPSPACE, that is ridiculous. GNU/Linux is the only OS that can boot from a logical partition so keep this in mind when you partition the hard drive for a multiboot.
Here is my partitioning scheme:
/- 800 Mb is more than enough;A large /partition is a bad idea, because it's hard to recover in case of a system crash.
SWAP : it depends on the amount of RAM you have and the profile of your machine. My home computer has 640 Megs of RAM, so I allocate only 256 Mb. The point is to place the swap partition closer to the beginning
of the hard drive, where access to data is faster.
What goes next? Yes the /var. On my Slackware system this
partioin is very small: 102 Mb. The size of this partion may vary depending on the type of your OS and the machine's profile. That's why it's called /var.
Next partition is /tmp. On my home machine it occupies 500Mb. On that partiton I usually create packages. On a server it may of course be larger, but on a desktop it's pointless to give it more than 1Gb.
/var and /tmp should always reside on separate partitions,
be it a server or a home desktop!
Next partion is /usr: there reside our programs and statical data(libraries). The size of it depends on how many packages you plan to install. A good idea for multiuser computers: in /usr/local you can create separate directories for shared files like films and music.
And the last one is /home. In case you have a big /usrpartition, this one mustn't be quite large. Decide for yourself how large it should be. To summarize:
/: primary, active; /dev/hda1
SWAP : logical; /dev/hda5
/var : logical; /dev/hda6
/tmp : logical; /dev/hda7
/usr : logical; /dev/hda8
/home : logical; /dev/hda9

Even if your hard disk has several hundreds Gb of storage space, partition it correctly.
And never trust installers like YaST, DrakX, Anaconda, DiskDruid or Debian installer to automatically partition your hard drives; they are stupid.
FDISK rules!

Is this a fact, or your own personal opinion? If it's been proven, I'd like to see a link to the data.

Thanks!

My personal opinion is based on the fact that YaST,as a partitioner, assigns only 2 partitions per drive: / and SWAP whatever large your hard disk should be.
The Debian/Ubuntuinstallers automatically place the SWAP space to the end of hard disk and that doesn't make sense.
I've used DrakXand YaSTand have nothing against them as system tools.

Fair enough. Just wanted to know if they were actually doing something destructive.

Personally, I back up my data rather frequently, as I don't actually upgrade- I'm quite partial to doing a fresh install with the newer versions and refreshing my data from the back-ups. But that's just my way...

Cheers

Me too. Distro upgrades are often sloppy, leaving behind orphaned files everywhere. To clean up manually takes hours. Wiping the correct partitions and installing a new version on a clean slate's faster and easier.

I know of one distro that does tell you there are orphan files and provides you with the command to remove them after an upgrade.

I use Mepis7 & 8, a debian based distro as a live CD to partion hard drives for linux & windows installations... I use Gparted that is on the live CD... I aways have a copy of the 32-bit versions of Mepis 7, and 8 on hand...

For Mepis on a 700Gig drive I will give 10 Gig for root, 2 or 3 gigs for swap depending on the memory in the system, and the remainder of the drive for home. Sometimes I will set the 3rd partion as an extended partion, so the user can have as many distros on the system as they would like...

When using the installer you direct which partion the system does the install... My swap partions are always in the second position...

JR

I have nothing against Mandriva, at least I didn't until your obsessive,invasive,and severely annoying spamming of it. You're worse then a TV info-mercial. Please, you and your 1337 friends go play and let the adults talk now.

LOL, I loved that one! Couldn't have said it better myself! Thanks for speaking up. I was about to, but bit my lip instead, lol.

Just what are you whinging about? If you don't like my posts, just walk on by. I'm not interested in your flame-baiting. Some folk just take things waaaaaay too seriously..

Guys, please chill out. Everyone has their favourite distro and it's far better than every other distro. That's a given. No need to go for handbags at 40 paces over it.

and for the record, I haven't seen this spamming of Mandriva by {BBI}Nexus{BBI}. Maybe you are confusing the sig block with the post? If so, the sig block will always show up, the only way not to see it is to disable sigs in your options.

XavierP: That is precisely my point. Loading a signature chock full of hyperlinks (let alone external ones, that do not support Linux Forums in any way) is not only spamming, it's high efficiency fully automated spamming. The fact I do not use the distribution itself is meaningless in the argument here. Come to think of it, if it were links to openSUSE sites I'd be doubly insulted by the poor representation of my community.

That's annoying enough, but to follow up posts of "I know of one distro that..." like we're supposed to all perk up and say "oh? what's that??" It's a probe to solicit more spamming, that's what it is.


Then you wouldn't have responded at all, would you? The fact you did implies you like the attention. That, and you're stuck in a fantasy world where people who tell you to go away are really
saying they want to start an argument. If you want that much of my time, I'll need a billing address so I can send you the invoice.

Now that I've made my point and defended it's validity, I'll sink back into the darkness, for I do not condone flame wars nor wish to make the moderators job any harder.