partition tips for a noob
 

hi. My uncle was the one who set up my partitions so i could play around with linux when my windows os crashed and burned. I'd like to resize some of the paritions but a little worried i might mess something up. Is there any dos and don'ts of partition that i should know? I could ask my uncle to do it again for me but i'd like to do it to get the epxerience. Im looking to resize the partition with fedora core 2 on it and have another linux partition to install another distro (once again for the experience) the partition tool i have on here seems to be fdisk. thanks

When you partition you lose all of your data unless you use a tool like partition magic (but even then it is a good idea to backup stuff that you don't want lost forever). Fdisk works fine for partitioning but some users find it hard to use--it is pretty intuitive, just play artound a bit to get the feel for it. Fdisk will not preserve data in any way, so when it writes the new partition table to the disk, all the info is gone.

Ideally, you'll want the following partitions for each Linux install:

/swap (2X RAM or 700MB, whichever is smaller)
/ (2GB-10GB for OS and applications)
/home (the rest)


It can also be a good idea to set /tmp and /boot to seperate partitions as well, but if you are just playing around, you'll be fine without doing that.

thanks. Sounds like something i should play around with on a drive i don't care about first to get the feel for it. But to use fdisk on a new drive how would i do that? would i need a floppy with the utility on it or a linux distro on a floppy?

Most Linux distros have that (maybe all of them). Last time I used it was setting up my Slackware box, so you could grab the Slackware10 iso and play with that. There is surely an easier way, but I don't normally just play with fdisk.