Hi folks,

When creating a disk partition, is there a way to specify the size of the file system in terms of percentage of remaining disk space, as opposed to number of cylinders or size in MB or GB?

Thanks!

Hi cafemondegar,

Welcome to LQ!!!

As far as I am aware you can only specify disk size in terms of cylinder or in MB or GB not in terms of percentage.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi there,

what's your reason for wanting to do that? It seems unusual to me, because usually, you need a certain amount of space for a partition, regardless of the remaining space.

I remember in the old days of DOS, fdisk would allow to specify either a number (which was taken as the number of megabytes), or a number followed by a percent sign, which was -obviously- taken as a percentage.
I'm not sure if Linux fdisk supports that, I think it doesn't. The graphical frontend gparted definitely doesn't. But is it a problem to do some simple math in your head? I mean, if you read that the remaining space is 86196MB (just an arbitrary figure), and you want 30% of that, you'd end up with about 26GB (or 26000MB). It ain't that difficult, is it?

[X] Doc CPU

Thanks for replying, Doc CPU.

I am trying to create a template I can use to automate OS builds on several servers that might differ in hard disk size but will each be used to run the same services (in different environments, like Development or QA).
You're right in saying that the math is not hard, if I am just doing a one time install on one server.
You are also right in suggesting that I am trying to do something unusual. Just because a server has a bigger hard drive doesn't mean the root or var filesystems suddenly need proportionately larger sizes.

Hi there,

automated installations, okay, I see your point.

That's why I thought you'd allocate a constant size for most of the file systems, and leave all the remaining space to one of them, for instance the root file system or /home.

[X] Doc CPU