LinuxQuestions.org - installations/partitons/directories etc etc

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installations/partitons/directories etc etc

So after a recent system crash, which I won't bore you with I am just finishing sorting it out, which has caused me to remember that apparently, I should really set things up as different directories/partitions

What I mean is, that I understand that it's often better if you have root, /usr, /etc, and so on, on partitions.

does this mean that I would literally have to have 6 or 7 partitions, say root being hda2, /etc being hda3, /home being hda4 ???

This is something that I've heard/read about somewhere, but don't really understand it, or how I would actually achieve it, or what the possible benefits would be.

Could someone explain it to me please ?

regards

John

p.s. and as I have mandrake and debian (knoppix 3.3 hard disc) at the moment, would that mean that I would have to double the number of partitions so both systems have their own /etc, /home, /usr ???

Yes both system would have their own partions and this is quite a few especially if you have 5 or so distros like I have on one machine. The advantages are:
1) Updgrades are easier (you don;t need to format data partitions eg /home)
2) There is less fragmentation of program files since they are not on data partitions
3) You can arrange partitions so that program partitions such as /usr are at the start (faster part of the drive)

Ok,

So using the Proper Filesystem Layout link , kindly supplied by Fancypiper, as a guide.

The idea of using root, usr, var, tmp and home as the base file systems, leads to the questions of what would actually go into each partition, how big should each partition be (proportionally by % as I currently have nearly 50 gig's for mandrake, and 45 gig's for debian(knoppix) ), can this be accomplished with my system installed i.e. make the current mandrake partition say 5 gig's and then re partition the rest of the space into the /, /usr, /var, /tmp and /home, then move the various files/directories to the corresponding partition (though even to me this sounds like it is getting vvv complicated) or, just bin the current mandrake system and repartition the existing mandrake partition and then re-install the various components into the various directories ???

In fact, would/should I do it as per the later as it would offer an element of "ease" and would the mandrake standard install know which bit's to put where or would I have to use "expert" install and tell it which bit's to put where ???

Any idea's or suggestions please.

regards

John

p.s. If I do this, do you think it would be better to do it with my existing 9.1 and then install 9.2 "over the top" ? i.e. would it "know" to install the bit's in the correct place or would I have to "upgrade" 9.1 to 9.2 and would it then know which bit's to put where ???

bump! sorry, but I've managed to totally fuck up my system trying to install slackware from this months linuxformat magazine, so I need have some idea of what I would need to do size wise, so I can re-install mandrake (stuck with windows only at the moment).

Any idea's or suggestions much appreciated.

regards

John

It sounds like you have tons of room, so perhaps a practical example of a multiboot system would help. Here is my setup, using grub for bootloader.

Code:

Fri Nov 28 02:59pm fancy@tinwhistle ~$ su -

Password: 

Fri Nov 28 03:01pm root@tinwhistle ~ # fdisk -l



Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4865 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes



  Device Boot    Start      End    Blocks  Id  System

/dev/hda1  *        1      1217  9772056    c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA)

/dev/hda2  *      1217      1229    99855  83  Linux

/dev/hda3          1230      1656  3429877+  83  Linux

/dev/hda4          1657      4865  25776292+  5  Extended

/dev/hda5          1657      1719    506016  82  Linux swap

/dev/hda6          1720      2146  3429846  83  Linux

/dev/hda7          2147      2573  3429846  83  Linux

/dev/hda8          2574      3719  9205213+  83  Linux

/dev/hda9          3720      4865  9205213+  83  Linux



Disk /dev/hdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 9729 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes



  Device Boot    Start      End    Blocks  Id  System

/dev/hdb1  *        1      973  7815591  87  NTFS volume set

/dev/hdb2          974      1946  7815622+  83  Linux

/dev/hdb3          1947      2919  7815622+  83  Linux

/dev/hdb4          2920      9729  54701325  83  Linux

My /etc/fstab

Code:

# Celeron 850 tinwhistle Red Hat 7.3 /etc/fstab file

# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.13 2003/07/17 19:55:18 azarah Exp $

#

# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't

# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage

# efficiency).  It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to

# switch between notail and tail freely.



# <fs>          <mountpoint>    <type>                <opts>                <dump/pass>

/dev/hda6        /              reiserfs        defaults        1 1

/dev/hda2        /boot          ext3                defaults        1 2

none            /dev/pts        devpts                gid=5,mode=620  0 0

/dev/hda8        /home          reiserfs        defaults        1 2

#/dev/hda3        /mnt/gentoo    reiserfs        defaults        1 2

#/dev/hda7        /mnt/mandrake  ext3                defaults        1 2

/dev/hda1        /mnt/win98        vfat                defaults        0 0

none            /proc          proc                defaults        0 0

none            /dev/shm        tmpfs                defaults        0 0

/dev/hdb4        /pub            ext3                defaults        1 2

/dev/hda9        /snd            reiserfs        defaults        1 2

/dev/hda5        swap            swap                defaults        0 0

/dev/cdrom        /mnt/cdrom        iso9660                noauto,owner,ro 0 0

/dev/fd0        /mnt/floppy    auto                noauto,owner    0 0

And my /boot/grub/grub.conf file

Code:

# Celeron 850 tinwhistle /boot/grub/grub.conf file

default=0

timeout=10

splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz



title Red Hat Linux 7.3

        root (hd0,1)

        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-20.7 ro root=/dev/hda6 hdd=ide-scsi

        initrd /initrd-2.4.20-20.7.img



title Mandrake 9.0

        kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 quiet devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi

        initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img



title Gentoo

        root (hd0,1)

        kernel (hd0,1)/boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda3 hdd=ide-scsi



title Windows2k Pro

        rootnoverify (hd1,0)

        chainloader +1



title Windows 98 Suckey Edition

        rootnoverify (hd0,0)

        chainloader +1

And my disk space:

Code:

Fri Nov 28 03:06pm root@tinwhistle ~ # df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda6            3.3G  2.4G  910M  73% /

/dev/hda2              94M  15M  74M  17% /boot

/dev/hda8            8.8G  1.4G  7.4G  16% /home

/dev/hda1            9.3G  4.6G  4.7G  50% /mnt/win98

/dev/hdb3            7.3G  1.1G  5.9G  15% /mnt/markrose

none                  125M    0  124M  0% /dev/shm

/dev/hdb4              51G  33G  15G  68% /pub

/dev/hda9            8.8G  5.1G  3.7G  58% /snd

I have tons of stuff installed on each OS except tor 2k pro. Installation is in progress as soon as I do some studying as I understand that it's install can see and fsck up stuff.. I am doing things backwards, so I gotta be careful.

Mandrake had some stuff in it's boot directory that I was unfamiliar with, so that doesn't share the /boot partition. Red Hat and Gentoo use /boot in common, all linux share /home, /pub and other odd named directories I have.

HTH

I can sort of see what's occuring with your system Fancypiper, but I'm still very confused.

Currently, I have got a 120gig drive split into 4. hda1 being windows xp about 20 gig's, hda2 is a 1 gig linux swap partition, hda3 is about 50gig's and this is where my mandrake should reside (when I haven't managed to cock it up :() and hda4 which is about 49gig's and normally had the knoppix/debian unstable/testing on it.

Now presuming that I'm not going to need to touch the windows or the swap, I have the best part of 100 gig's to play with.

So, using the Proper Filesystem Layout link as a guide, does this mean that I need to have /tmp, /var, /usr, / and /home partitions for both mandrake and knoppix/debian i.e. 10 different partitions or will some of them work across both distro's.

I've checked my copy of O'really's "Running Linux" and it all makes absolutely no sense at all. I don't follow how big each of the partitions would need to be, or what actually would go into each partition. I tried following what you have done but don't understand which of the partitions would need to be primary, logical, extended or whatever.

Also, do the different partitions need to be set up as different types of file system i.e. ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs and so forth ??? Can I not just use one type of file system to keep things simple?

Could you illuminate a little ??????

regards

John