I'll soon install Slackware on my new harddrive and I'm not sure how big the partitions should be. The install help at slackware.com tells me that it's a good idea to make seperate partitions for /, /home, and /usr so that's what I'll do.

My harddrive has 166 GB of free space.

I was thinking I'd make partitions for

/
/home
/usr
swap (I've got 512 RAM)
and a partition for my music and films, this should be the biggest.

What would you do?

I have only two partitions, a / an /home.... All the files I wish to permanently save are on my /home partition

my / partition about 10GB and nowhere near full.... keeping in consideration I also have a quite large /usr/src/ directory, since I like to keep the configured source handy when I have compiled & installed programs myself.

If I ever format, reinstall, whathaveyou.... I back up /root, /etc, /usr/src/, /var, /usr/share/icons, /usr/share/pixmaps, and anything else of value to /home/backup for possible restoration or comparision later.

I would basically just decide this:

1) How many partitions do I "need"? Will there ever be a time when having a seperate /opt partition would be genuinely useful, for example?

2) How many partitions do I necessarily want to deal with, especially in a scenario where I do something wrong and need to mount all these partitions via livecd, for example?

3) How large does each partition need to be? Think waaay into the future, for example my /home partition is 55GB, whereas I'm currently only using less than half that. I generally use the same software all the time and a few games, so I can always get by with less that 15GB for / .


PS: I have 512MB RAM, and a 512MB swap.... for the record I can only thing of about 2 instances where the swap file has ever been touched, and only one of them was on slackware 10. SuSE seemed a bit swap-happy when I tried out 9.1.

Well I've already decided what partitions I want to have but what's hard is deciding how big they should be. I don't know how much /, /home and /usr needs. I think I'll give swap 512 megabytes and the partition for my music will get whatever's left.

if you've got space to spare (and it sounds like you do)... you could make /usr about 15GB and / about 10GB, that should cover almost anything.....

also an idea is to leave some space at the end of your drive (i have 8GB unpartitioned) so if you decide to play with more than one distro or OS you don't have to worry about resizing or moving partitions.