Hello

Background
I have recently bought a second, clean 500GB hard drive for my laptop PC, and intend to install Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit on it with the intention of eventually replacing my existing hard drive (running Windows 7) and using only Linux. Before I start with the installation, however, I want to get the partitioning right to avoid problems further down the line. I’ve done a bit of reading on the net to try and teach myself as much as possible about this, but there is an overwhelming amount of material covering this subject, much of it apparently out-dated and contradictory (to me at least).

As a Linux newbie I understood little of what was being said, but it did lead me to believe that I need to partition the clean hard drive more or less as follows:

1. Root partition on which I will install Ubuntu, 20GB. I’d like to have only the OS on this partition, and enough space so that I can easily experiment with different distros down the line.
2. Swap partition, 9GB (I understand the rule of thumb is the swap partition must be at least equal to the amount of RAM)
3. A partition for personal data and the system files of all the programs I’ll install, ~70GB. (/home?)
4. A partition for all my photos, music, documents, etc. Sized to occupy the remaining space on the hard drive, ~400GB. (/usr?)

I’ll be partitioning the hard drive using the Linux installer, unless there's a good reason not to?

My computer specs:
HP EliteBook 8540p
Intel i5-520M
8GB RAM

Questions
1. Did I leave out anything important? Any suggestions for improvement to this proposed partitioning scheme?
2. Naming convention: What do I call the partitions? What is the difference between naming a partition ‘/dev/sda2’ or ‘swap’ (for example). Some of the time the documentation refer to ‘/dev/xxxx/’ convention, and other times ‘/’,’swap’, ‘/home’, etc. It’s confusing.
3. Primary and logical partitions: Which partitions needs to be primary, which needs to be logical, and what is the difference between the 2?
4. File Systems: Which partitions need to have which file systems (ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, etc)? I’m guessing that the partition (4) above might need to be FAT/NTFS, so it can be read by Windows if need be?

Thanks in advance !

These are all very good questions and I will try to shed some light on them for you.
The Linux file system is a flat file system with everything under / which is also known as root. In Windows, each partition, or logical drive, has a drive letter assigned to it such as C:, D:. This is not the case in Linux; it is all flat under the one structure. You have been doing some reading, which is great and I would recommend that you try to find some documentation on the layout of the file system. It does follow an organized pattern and once you "get it" it will make sense, though it will probably take a while till this just happens. Here is a great resource for you: http://ftacademy.org/materials/fsm/13 (the other resources on that site are good too but start with that).

Here is a short description of the major partitions:
/ Root, is the root of the file system, the base of the tree
/bin, /sbin contain binary application files, related to the system (sbin) and other functions (mostly utilities) /bin
/usr and /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and the like under /usr are reserved for the user to install binary application files
/etc contains application configuration files. This will be one of the primary directories you learn to work in
/home contains all the home directories of the various users
/var contains information that will change often, such as log files
/dev and /proc are pseudo file systems. Everything in Linux is treated as a file, including the USB sticks, mouse, keyboard, etc. And these directories are associated with the hardware. Consequently, your drive partitions will appear under the /dev for device "files". /dev/sda1 is the first partition on the first drive, /dev/sda2 is the second and so forth. Similarly, /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2 will be the first and second partition on the second hard drive.

My recommendation would be to create the following: / and make it moderately sized. 20-50 GB should be sufficient. /home make fairly large. You can have multiple users in the /home space and if you install multiple distributions, each will need a separate / partition, but you can share /home (just use different users and you will have no conflicts). I would also create some swap space. Back in the old days of little memory, 1-2x you phyiscal memory was good. These days it is a waste. I would recommend 1-2 GB of swap space as more than sufficient. Unless you start running a lot of applications or virtual machines you probably won't be wanting for physical memory.

Your / /home, etc can be what ever file system you would like. Generally speaking, Linux users go with the EXT (or extended file system) with EXT4 being the latest incarnation. EXT is what is called a journaling file system which isn't subject to fragmentation like FAT or NTFS. If you want to share between Windows and Linux, you can use a USB Stick or a SAMBA server or whatever. I wouldn't worry too much about creating a FAT or NTFS partition just to share stuff between. Linux can read the NTFS and you can always work from there to move between the hard drives.

The above partitions would be on your new drive (for Linux). Create the three partitions and install Linux after Windows. This is called Dual Booting. It will put a new boot loader on your primary drive and partition (with Windows) and let you select between the operating systems. If/When you decide you want to remove Windows, you can remove the drive and update your boot loader to point to your remaining drive. Linux is very forgiving and adaptable about hardware changes.

Lastly, with IDE and SATA drives you can have some many (4) primary partitions. Beyond this you need extended partitions, where your last primary partition becomes a shell that holds all the other Logical partitions. Nothing really too it, it is just a way to get more than 4 partitions on a drive.

Hope that helps, but if not, ask away.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks Noway, you've given me a lot to chew on, let me give it a bash!

Cheers!

Hello Stefaans,

most things are said in this thread.

About the swapspace, you'll need at least as much swapspace as your RAM if you want to use the "suspend to RAM" function. If you don't I'd recommend up to 256MB of swap or none at all.

I use a big separate partition which I mount as /usr/local/public for every distribution I'm running. Every user (only me) has his own directory in /usr/local/public, Here as an example my output of ls -lh in the /home/markus directory:the symbolic links point to the directories which I use from every distribution. But my /home directory is not very big, mostly I use about 8GB, yet I've 15GB, it's only to store the configuration files. Here my output of df -hIf you want to install only Linux on the new harddrive, I'd recommend only to use one extended partition with logical partitions on it , they are much more flexible than primary partitions. Nowadays primary partitions are only good for Windows, here my partitiontableI've repartitioned this disk several times, I ran OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Arch, Gentoo and Slackware as well as Windows on the machine, yet only Slackware and Windows 7. The partitions are not in disk order.

Markus

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks Markus

I probably won't (at least initially) have more than one distro installed. Glad to hear I can make all the partitions logical, I wasn't too sure about that.

Cheers!