In linux why would you want to partition? Seems like making more than two partitions 'SWAP and root' would be redundant... It you made more then it seems like you are just limiting your space when it might be needed elsewhere. Like, I made four partitions... root, /home, /var, and /etc. but my /var got full so then I couldn't use that partition till I rearranged it with more space. I'm sure there's some good reason why to do partitioning, I just want to know it...

1st- it is always easier to back up or to move a system having several partition. When my HD crashed (when it once crashed, the damn thing died twice) I lost everything but I had /etc and /usr on back up. Pretty easy to build back your system when you have these 2 folders, you just need some base.

2nd-It is safer. I was once installing Winbloze 98 on that computer on another HD for a friend. My linux Hd wasn't unplugged, and the damn Satan's OS writed something on my Linux hd first partition, so killed my entire root partition (I have msged M$ about that I never received an answer), but my two others partition was safe.

3rd-It can give you some extra speed if you are using 2 hard drives, since your OS have to wait less long about the damn HD search time. And you might be able to save some data if one of your HD die.

These are the 3 reason I first think of. I have 3 linux box here, one is having 5 different partitions, as /, /etc, /usr, /home, /var. The second is having 2, as / and /usr and the last one, only 1.

I can see how in your situation you would want to. But for me... I don't see a point still. I have just bought a new HD with plenty of space to expand. I also back up my HD after I make any major amounts of changes not just one partition. And it's also just a server so I don't dual boot on OSes.

Well, especially for a server, when your /var expands rapidly and freezes your whole system, you'll wish you had put it on its own partition. And swap should be on its own partition, anyway, so if you're gonna do two, why not three or more? Maybe if you've got a 200 gig HD and a gig or so of RAM it actually wouldn't be an issue. I dunno. Better safe than sorry and all those dumb expressions.

you don't NEED partition, you just may want to find it usefull.
If you don't then you don't need it. My linux router has 1 partition and it's ok to me

One other reason I can think of is that you might want to use different file systems for the different paritions (e.g. you might want your /var to be on ReiserFS because it's good when you have lots of small files, but on the other hand you might want your / parition on ext2 because it's a bit more tried and tested). A more obscure reason is that you can put paritions holding filesystems which need to be accessed quickly (e.g. /var again) near the centre of the HD to improve performance.

Alex

I have a 120GB that I put on it. And yeah I made a SWAP partition ofcourse. It's also not that heavy loaded, so I don't really worry about it freezing up. But sometimes it messes up and it tries to boot into X-window but just keep flashing the command prompt on and off. I don't know if it has anything to do with X-windows but I'm just switching to pure text based... Also I was wondering if anyone has installed MySQL on RedHat 8.0? Did it go smoothly? Because I'm running into problems.

Why do you keep your jackets on hangers in the closet and your socks in drawers, and your shoes on the rack?

Why do you not just dump them in a heap on the floor, the room is big enough is it not?

/ , /usr, /usr/lib, /var, /tmp, /home all have different purposes,
and if you have more than one disk, which you should, you follow
instructions in the Multi-Disk-HOWTO to get better performance,
such as putting /usr on one disk and /usr/lib on the other.

That is the best damn analogy I've ever heard in terms of partitions. Cheers Corin!

P.S. I do throw all my clothes on the floor though but still...

That is a good analogy Corin, but it seems like that would work with folders too. You can keep it all in separate folders but it seems like the only time you'll notice that you even have separate partitions is when it says, 'you've ran out of disk space'. So I guess, to me, hangers, drawers, and racks can all be 'folders' and you won't be limiting yourself. I mean, linux is all about not limiting yourself right?

You are missing entirely the point about the "functional purpose" of the the nature of the files in the partitions.

Consider your dirty clothes -- you may keep these all neat and tidy in some sort of holder (a linen basket perchance) but you keep them separate from your drawers of clean clothes.

And what about food? Food is food right? You can keep it all in the same cupboard, but on different shelves (folders)? No! You put perishable items in the refrigerator. And do you put your frozen food on the same shelves as the fresh food in the refrigerator? No, you put the frozen food in a separate partition, the freezer section, or EVEN, you put it in a different device entirely, a standalone freezer.

On a stable system, for good security, it is recommended that you mount /usr as read only. But the system as you know needs to write temporary files to /tmp and transients to /var. So if everything is just on the root partition you are limiting yourself to being unable to mount /usr as read only.

And you have ignored my comments about multi disk systems, and we have not even touched on facilities such as partitions on RAID, management of partitions with LVM etc etc

And here is a little thing to consider. If you have everything in a single partition and part of the disk goes bad, then you could very well loose everything, wherease if you have different paritions, then you may only lose data in that partition.

Unless you implement quotas, how are you going to prevent your users from filling up the single root partition with their downloads, thus rendering the whole system unusable?

Ever deleted an ASCII file you did not intend to delete? If you act quickly and can unmount that paritition (if it was on home, you would not have to go to single user mode if there were no users on the system) you can do

dd if=/dev/hda{partition_number} of=/some_other_big_enough_partition/image_file.dd

and then split up the file into chunks and use a text editor to find the missing text.

If you only have one huge 80 GB partition on your disk, then you cannot do the above.

Without a set of rules, you have no freedom, and you are LIMITING yourself to what you can do.

I am never going to convince you by these examples to follow a policy of a sound scheme of partitioning your disks and ensuring better protection for your data. You will only learn of its necessity by hard experience.

Well I learned something today... About linux organization and organizing my food, laundry, and goats.

Goats? Where did the goats come into it?

I missed that one. :+)

And here on our very own Forum is an example of somebody who
kept everything under one partitions and ran into problems.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=77877

Another handy thing is that if you keep your /home under a separate partition, it makes upgrading a snap on most distros...or even when switching distros (to a point).

Basically this would allow you to format everything but your /home (with all your settings and stuff) and reinstall fresh, while keeping your info.