i am a newbie.

what is the best way to set up the mount points.

is this a good way?

/ and 100 mb swap on one hd
/usr on another hd

this is what i tryed the first time i installed linux.
my hd died, but i think it was probably something i did.

could you also tell me how much space should go to each mount point, because i know there are many. thanks

Well, I usually make a 100 mb swap space. Depending on how big the rest of your drive is, depends on you now on how big you want each partition and if you want like /usr or /tmp on separate partitions.
I usually do mine like this

swap 100mb
/boot 16mb
/ usually around 4 or 5 gigs
/home around 4 gigs
/tmp around a half gig or little more
/usr same as /tmp

It just all depends.....the easiest setup though would be this:

100mb swap
16mb /boot
2 or 3 GB /home
/ the rest for root

I used Partition Magic version 6 to set up the Linux Ext2 partition at 2048mb and the Linux Swap at 271mb.
When I installed Mandrake Linux 7.2 I set the mount point / at hda5. After I set the mount point the install program formated hda5. My question is how can I tell how much was devoted to:
/boot
/
/home
/tmp
/usr

Andy

thanks for the reply about the mount points. could you tell me what linux exactly uses those mount points for?

that's pretty much the only thing i have trouble deciding when installing linux...

thanks

Well for instance, / is kind of like C: in Windows.
Everything or every directory is under /. Now like the /home directory is used for regular users personal files.
/tmp is for like log files, temp files. /usr is for like programs, and /etc is for configuration files. If you notice or browse to each directory, you will see what each mainly consists of. Like your /lib directory, is for library files.
Hope that helps you out in any way.

And everest63, if you created a swap of 271mb, and you didn't create any other partitions, when you think of / at hda5, that is one large partiton for you linux filesystem.
All the directories then would be under / on the same partition on hda5 and all share the same amount of space. So if you install or use up more than 2048, then your out of space.

Hope that helps in anyway clarifing that for you.

Check this out:
http://www.linuxhq.com/ldp/howto/mini/Partition/

Incidently, for a workstation, you will get the best system performance having just /, /boot, and swap. But for a server, you will want to consider some of the security and administrative things mentioned in that How-To

thank you for your help.

i understand the file system and mount points alot better now.

thanks again!