Just switched over from the windows world and have a question about partitions and mounting. I have Mandriva Corporate Server 4 which is on a 50GB partition formatted ext3 and mount point is /. I have a remaining 250GB on that drive that I want to format ext3 for saving data to. What would the mount point be when I go to format the 250GB? my old setup was Windows 2K3 Server on c: drive and data on d: drive. If c: crapped out (which it did many times) i would reinstall to c: and everything on d: was untouched and accessible under "My Computer". I would like this same setup on Linux in case I screw anything up and have to reinstall. Thanks for any suggestions!

Whatever you want to name it. I have a partition with all my music and a few videos. I mount it at /multimedia. If it is a partition full of many different types of files (like your My Documents), then maybe you want to mount the 250GB partition at /home.

If you ever have to reinstall, then you would either tell the installer where to mount the 250GB partition (every installer I've used allows you to create mount points like /multimedia) or don't use the 250GB partition during the installation, manually add the mount point, and edit your fstab after successfully re-installing.

Assuming the 250GB you're talking about is a partition, that's what you format (with a mkfs variant), before the partition is mounted. Once you've formatted it, you make a directory anywhere in the filesystem (it has to be a descendent of "/") with "mkdir" and then use the mount command to mount the partition on that directory.

You can change your mind about where to mount it. Just make a directory somewhere else, unmount your partition, and mount it on the new directory.

Edit fstab if you want the partition mounted automatically every time you reboot.