I'm using Suse for some time now and I have decided to remove the Windows XP from the machine because i don't use it anymore.

It's a Athlon XP 1600+ machine with 512 MB ram, one 80GB and one 60GB HD, DVD burner, DVD rom, GeForce4 MX440,...

The computer is going to be used as a desktop and just for my private things, no work. So just surfing, mail, personal photos, music,....

What would be a reasnoble partitioning scheme?

Right now I have a bunch of partitions off all sorts and I plan to wipe the both of the HD clean.

The planed distribution is Suse 10.0 or 10.1 (not jet decided but most probably 10.1).

The three obvious partitions are:
/
/swap
/home

Various pages, posts, HOWTO-s say that a separate
/var
/usr
partitions vould be a good idea.

I was thinking maybe some kind of a seperate backup partition would allso be smart.

In the end I got lost when trying to figure out some reasnoble sizes for all those partitions, so any advice is more than welcome.

Korto

I would just partition the 60 GB hard drive for /, swap and home and anyothers you want. 80 GB would be purely for your valuable data. You can then mount that 80 GB hard drive in a directory inside your home directory. A more simpler way could be to separate out /home on 80 GB entirely.

I have three OS and each has 25 GB / partition, each OS has a 10 GB /home and all share a single swap partition. Rest of my music, documents etc is on a 250 GB share common between all OS.

Tux,

Hi Korto
I may be no expert, but.....
My experience is that you should use the smaller HDD (60G) as your main drive (i.e hdax) and the larger as your reserve. Why? Becuase it makes it easier to stuf 60G's into 80 (if it comes to that) than what it is to do it the other way around.
In terms of your partitions, are you intending on going with the suggestions from the how-to's? that is, with the seperate /var and /usr partitions? I have found that letting the installer work these out has worked wonders so far, but then again, as mentioned, I am no expert.
In terms of your /home partition, how many users so you have on your machine? just you? or your whole family. This could be a deciding factor in determining how much space you will need to set aside for this partition.

Hope this info helps!

for a desktop system, i wouldn't even bother with separate /var and /usr partitions. i would just make /home, /swap, and / on the 60GB, and use the 80GB for data and backing up what you need to from hda.

That's the thing that I don't know, and is one of the reasons for asking the question.

Basicaly it's just me, my wife uses the computer some times but she just surfs the net and downloads a few mails every now and then. She really did not like the concept of logging in every time she starts the comp so now i had only one user logged in automaticaly and two mailer clients.

The one that generates "a lot" of files is me, but that is nothing that could not be periodically burnt to some data dvd-s.

The thing that I did not mention (and I should have) is that the 60GB Maxtor is acting a bit strange lately.

First of all there where some clicking sounds from the computer and then Suse would not boot and there was a message that I should run fsck manually on a 10GB partition (on the 60GB Maxtor) I used only as a strorage partition for Azureus (a BitTorrent client).


I ran fsck on the partition and there was a long list of errors that where fixed. After that there was no problems for a while. A couple of days ago there was the clicking sound again and when I rebooted the compputer the 60GB Maxtor was not reckognized by the BIOS for a couple of times.

When I finaly managed to boot the machine normally by repetition I unmounted the partition, ran fsck on the partition and everyting was fine. Then I downloaded a iso image of a disc with some Maxtor diagnostic software, booted from that CD and ran the diagnostic test. Everyting is fine. And right now everything works like a charm.

So either the Maxtor is dying on me or the IDE cable is damaged all of a sudden.

I know I should have mentined all that before, but taking all that in consideration I would prefer to put the 80GB WD as the main disc. BTW I ran a diagnostic test on that one also and everything was fine.

I would go with what slackhack mentioned, and not btoher about manually assigning /usr and /var partitions - just let the installer automatically sort that out for you.

If you are able to sort the issues out with the 60G(and you mention that you may have already done that) Then I would seriously consider using THAT as your main drive in favor of the 80G as the main drive. As I said in the last post, it makes it so much easier to back stuff up from a 60G to an 80G rather than the other way around - but then again, I would only do that if you can reliably get the 60G to boot every time.
If not, dice it, and get a new one, with more space!


:two cents:

i agree with DJNolz83 on using the 60GB as the system drive. i would much rather have to reinstall an OS than lose all my data. if /home and /etc (at least) are backed up to the second hard drive it's almost a non-issue to reinstall -- just a matter of some down time. try getting your data back though, when that 60GB fscks the shark and all your data was on it.

OK. Thanks everyone!

I'll go with the 60GB as the main drive and the 80GB as the second, and with the /,/home and /swap partitions on the 60GB one. The 80GB is going to be for backup and ....