hi,
Is this a good idea to have two hard drives in the system when I first installing linux? I have one 40GB at the primary interface of the 1st IDE controller (cable selected) and the other one 180GB at the secondary interface of the 1st IDE controller (cable selected). Here are my questions:

1) should the 180GB hard drive be names /dev/hdb or /dev/hdc
2) is this correct way to put /, /boot, swap, /tmp in the first hard drive (40GB) and /home in the 2nd hard drive (180GB)? I don't know what I am thinking is a correct way.

Any comments are welcome !!

1) The name of your 2nd harddrive will be /dev/hdb

2) Partitioning is up to you except you shouldn't try to put important system folders like /usr or /etc on separate partitions because linux needs to have those ready before it mounts all of it's partitions. Also, it is recommended that you put your swap partition on a separate drive to improve performance, but that's not really important if you have a lot of RAM.

I have 3 hard disks in a system 120g 200g 200g.

If you want to experiment with other distro's you should divide the large hard disk in advance.

Keep in mind that if you divide it in say in 4 partitions, you still have those partitions in one file system.

I have even one partition in vfat. Not all distro's use the same file system, but mostly they all can read Vfat with no problem.

So If I want to have things common or share things, I save them on that partition.


Have a lot of fun....

CloudBuilder

Thanks for your comments - Berto, CloudBuilder.
so here is what I am going to try

dev/hda Utility Partition 32MB (from Dell) DOS- 16 bit
/ 30GB or remaining
/boot 100MB........................................... will bigger # may slow down the booting time?
swap 2GB................................................I have 1GB RAM installed
/tmp 5GB...............................................I am running some 3D programs in my workstation

dev/hdb /home 180GB

I hope I am right and my system can run efficiently under my hard drive partition strategy. =)

anyone wants to share their hard drive partition experiences?

Should work fine.

My setup is as such:
/dev/hdb
1 - /
2 - /home
3 - /usr/local
4 - swap

A separate /boot partition sounds like a good idea, but I forgot about it last time I partitioned.