i have this monster of an machine. anyway i'm wondering what is the best way to partition it up. here's some relivalent information.

4 stick of 512 meg ram for total of 2 gig of ram

2 IDE western dightal harddrive - 200 gig each
2 SATA western dightal raptor hardddrive - 37 gig each

i'm not doing anything with raid or so atleast for now anyway i'm wondering what is the best methoid to take advange of my vast harddrive spaces and these quick raptors.

OS:

Window XP profesional
Gentoo with 2.6 kernel - pretty much needed for those SATA harddrives.


PURPOSE:

this is an gaming machine, plus an decent workstation for 3d graphics programing, and other items, i'm trying to get everything i can to work under linux if i can but window xp is mainly there as a fallback for those items that just performs poorly or dosen't work under gentoo.


QUESTIONS:

1) i loaded the gentoo 2.6 livecdrom and it correctly reconized all four harddrives and i could access them properly. hda and hdb for the twin IDE harddrive and sda and sdb for the twin raptors, i ran into an interesting problem the program hdparm i use to confug the IDE harddrive won't work for the SATA harddrives, and to get information from the SATA harddrives i used scsi_info instead of ide_info, anyway i'm wondering how i can set the harddrive parms for my SATA harddrives, and access them to figure out what params are supported?


2) can i setup one of my SATA harddrive to bootup the grub bootloader or will it have to be an IDE harddrive, i checked in the bios and it supports SATA harddrive booting first but does grub/linux support this yet? <-- probably a dumb question.


3) Should i have my boot partition under the linux harddrive or have it under the MASTER harddrive which probably will have xp on it cos windows complains if its not on the 1st harddrive.


4) i was expermenting with partiting and i discovered that linux supported several other partiting setup that had supports for different partition setup, instead of the 4 locial and extended partition of DOS/windows, now i'm wondering if i could do something like this.

for windows harddrives and harddrives that are used by windows i would use the standard ms/dos partition setup with 4 local and many extended partition. and for the linux one i could use one of those nice partition setup that had like 16 local partition without the extended ones? or does they all have to be the same, or would it just better to stick with dos/ms partition all the way?


5) with regards of swap i read that it was good idea to spread swap among multiple harddrives so i was thinking of spilting my 4 gig swap into two section, one section 2gig would go on the 1st raptor, and 2rd one would go on the second raptor harddrive, is this worth it or is it an placebo effect?

should i do the same thing with the windows swap or just stick everything that has to do with mircrosoft into one harddrive and setup spiked wires around it to keep it in ?


i think i got most of my questions out of the way, now here's my tentative partition setup, that is probably will be changed before i actually setup the system.


SATA 1: ( 37 gig)

/boot - 200 mb
Linux swap - 2 gig

windows stuff fills the rest of harddrive.
??? window swap ????

SATA 2: ( 37 gig)

/
/tmp
/var
/usr
/home & /root

the size of each, not quite sure, could use some suggestion we got 37 gig raptors to work with here


IDE 1: ( 200 gig)

programs - 40+ gig
games - (big one) 50+ gig
data storage - 20-40 gig or so, mainly pictures and some clips and stuff

shared xp / linux - 20-50 gig or so


IDE 2: (200 gig)

not a clue but i think i might take some stuff from IDE 1 and put it on IDE 2, like maybe IDE 1 is for programs and data related to programs, and IDE 2 is games and data related to games.



i know this is an frequre covered topic but i got an HUGE amount of harddrive space so i would like some suggrestion on how best to take advange of my harddrive spaces. plus i'm open to other options like EVM and LVM etc... but i'm fairly fuzzy on them so don't know much about them such as stability and so on.



THANKS YOU.

This is what I was thinking:
SATA 1:
/ 6GB minus 200MB
/boot 200MB
swap 4GB # I like making swap 1 partition so that there is less for the kernel to keep track of
27GB of Windows

SATA 2:
all Windows

IDE 1:
150 GB /usr # Programs and Games
50GB /home # File Storage

IDE 2:
More Windows (Games)

Linux can read write to any Windows partition by adding a line to /etc/fstab that is simuler to this:
/dev/hda1 /win vfat auto,quiet,umask=000 1 0

The boot partition does not have to be on the Master drive but it is a good
idea to have most of the Linux and Windows installation to be there.

Windows won't like anything that is different from its native format, for example,
you can't use ext2 formatted floppies in Windows. Use Windows standards unless you are absoluotly sure that you will only be working with Linux.

In order to boot any hard drive you just have to tell Grub/Lilo which hard drive's
Master Boot Record you want to write boot info on and adjust the Bios so that it boots up that hard drive. You probably want to list the hard drive right after the CD-ROM and floppy so that if you don't have to go into the bios ever.

thing is 150 gig for usr seems large to me, is it just me or, in the past when i expermented with linux and loaded some pretty full and heavy distros they ate like only 3 or 4 gig for alots of stuff installed, now granted there's the data and games to include but still. mm i dunno.

isn't NTFS much much faster and more effective for windows partitions?


mm i like your partition setup but i would prefer to have all of the linux stuff on one drive and windows on the other drive, meaning those raptors, one raptors get most of the linux stuff, and other raptor gets the core windows stuff, then i can divide up the IDE harddrive someway.

this is the latest revision.

SATA 1:

swap - 4 gig
/boot - 200 mb
/ - 4 gig
/tmp - 3 gig
/var - 5 gig
/home - 20 gig



SATA 2:

Window XP - 15-20 gig

Windows/linux shared partition - 17-22 gig


IDE 1:

/usr - 60 gig

window programs - 60 gig

80 gig spare for furture expansion and so forth


IDE 2:

Window games 1 - 60 gig
window games 2 - 60 gig

80 gig spare for furture expansion and so forth.

I would suggest using lvm and putting following under it:
/usr
/home
/opt
/var
/tmp

you can even set lvm to spread across several harddisks.
The setup isn't that easy, but once installed you just need 2 commands to change the size of a partition that is included on it.

btw: How much did you actually pay for that beast?

i heard about LVM and it sounds like a good deal but i'm not sure about system stability and the likes. plus most of em were for kenel 2.4 and i need 2.6 for my sata harddrive, this is in gentoo btw.

ah now for my beast, i paid about 2.5 grands. here's a detailed spec.

pentium 4 2.8c with hyperthreading, overclocked to 3.2ghz
4 stick of 512 meg cosair XMS pc3500 ram for 2 gig of ram
Abit IC7-G motherboard
Sapphire Radeon 9700 pro
Leadtek winfast tv tuner
intel pro gigabyte ethernet card
linkysys 4 computer router with hardware firewall (for windows)
pionner 16x dvdrom player
liteon 52x32x52x cdrom burner
sony floppy disk
lian-li 75 case to hold all the goodies plus my watercooling system in.
550 watt asus PSU
2 set of 200 gig western dightal harddrive
2 set of 37 gig western dightal raptor 10k rpm harddrive (SATA)
19 inch nes/millisai(spell) screen

plus several hundred dollars for my own custom watercooling system that cools the cpu, the video card. plus upgrades to all of the fan, 4x 80cfm 80mm fan plus two 120mm 120 cfm fans for the radator to keep air flow.

the total cost of the system in july was about 2.5 grands but it probably has droped a bit by now *shungs* i'm an power gamer and i'm also doing heavy 3d graphics work, i would love to have dual xeon, or now dual athon 64 but the xeon didn't have agp8x atleast ones i could find and was like way over 3 or 4 grands for all my extra goodies so.... i'm probably going to end up saving up some money and build myself an diskless barebone dual cpu system and hook like a few of em together in a small cluster so i can do my 3d graphics work faster.



anyway back to the question about LVM, i have read a bit on it but most of the document wasn't that clear on system stability and how to set it up under kenel 2.6 and i also read that lvm was being dropped in kernel 2.6 and that a different system was taking over??

ive decided to go on ahead and try out this new LVM thing its interesting and if it self destruct i can always redo it anyway.

i'm going to basically have my SATA harddrive hold the swap, boot, and root, then also a 4th partition for one part of the LVM then 60 gig on my IDE for the other LVM and if i need more i can carve out some more cos i have two spare 80 gig space on both IDE harddrives so that works good for me


NEVER MIND its refusing to work and going all buggy so i'm going to go regular partition system for now and later onice i figure out this LVM shit i'll recreate it

Installing LVM under gentoo is very easy, just check out their docs on their website. I think its one of the best things about gentoo: good docs in many languages.

I don't think that compiling will take a long time on such a machine.
I've tried installing gentoo on an 7 years old pc and believe me:
Failure is not an option
It took him about 2 days and a half to install so I don't really feel like doing a reinstall on it. But it uses LVM and it works just fine.

If you need any help, just post it here.

Wow, what's that 200MB /boot? WTF are you going to boot?! Space shuttle? In my opinion 20MB would be fair enough. (But I'm not the one with 470GB harddisk space, so it's all your decision )
I suggest about 10 gigs for /home, 10 for /usr, and about 3-4 for the other linux dirs. I think reiserfs is a good choice. Linux can write and write on NTFS, so I suggest making NTFS on all your other disks, divided by as much as possible partitions (purpose: making clusters smaller, and loosing minimal space, due to cluster size).

i'm going to give the whole lvm system an shot again i posted my problem on gentoo forums.

this is with the 2.6 kernel and right now i setted up all the partitiono but install didn't work so i'm redoing it and hoping to get lvm working.

anyway i heard the resierfs4 was coming out soon so would it be better to wait for the resiers4?

One suggestion.... Linux writing NTFS is exparimental and you must compile your kenel to support it.

I would NOT suggest writing to an NTFS partition as your prefered method of storage.

If you want performance in Linux use a journaling file system.

As for sharing a read/write file system between XP and Linux on the same machine VFAT is your options. I'd suggest defragmenting it weekly though if you use it often.