[SGVLUG] newbie qu: HDD partitions

[Alex Roston]

I generally use four partitions, and I make them all primary:

1.) boot - this partition is about 200 megs, and only holds the files 
needed to boot the computer. Ideally, if your drive gets screwed up, you 
can at least boot the machine, because the boot files are on a different 
partition, (and hopefully haven't gotten hosed when you tried that 
lovely new program and it blew up and started erasing drive sectors at 
random.)

2.) / - the "root" partition. I'd make this one about 15 gigs or so. It 
will hold all your applications. You could make it a little smaller - 
say 12 gigs - if you wanted more space for your personal stuff.

3.) swap. The rule of thumb is to make the swap drive twice as large as 
your amount of memory. That is, if you have 512 megs of memory, you 
should give yourself 1 gig of swap.

4.) home. This will hold your personal data files. I'd give it about 
four gigs. You could make it a little bigger if you wanted to.

Alex


Jeff Kutz wrote:

> Subj: newbie qu: HDD partitions
>
> I am going to load Fedora on a Dell Latitude C600 (1 GHz) laptop for a 
> dedicated Linux learn/play computer.  I am going with Fedora because 
> it came with the book Red Hat Linux by Mark G Sobell.
>
> My question is what would be the smartest way to partition the 20 GB 
> hard drive.  The author talks about partitions but it seems more like 
> subdirectories that he is talking about.  The way I read the book he 
> would have me putting in some half-dozen partitions.  I am coming from 
> the DOS/Windows world.  Am I missing something here in the transition?
>
> He talks about where I might run into a situation like a DOS attack 
> and I could suddenly get a truly huge collection of log files that 
> would fill up a partition and block other functions that need some 
> disk room to operate.  It has been my practice, even in the 
> DOS/Windows world, to create a separate partition for my data files.
>
> If you are starting from scratch, with a dedicated Linux laptop, how 
> many partitions would you build and what would you establish in each 
> one?  Would I maybe want three partitions, one for data, one for the 
> OS and applications, and one for swap and log files?
>
> Any words of wisdom would be appreciated.
>
> Jeff
>
>
>