Get help on partitioning here [Part 2]

xiaweitang · Apprentice Joined: 26 Feb 2010 Posts: 152

Thanks to all. This helps a lot.

Zeerak · Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2010 12:07 am Post subject:

Hey, I'm about to reinstall my system and I just thought I'd see how my partitioning scheme is considered (I shamefully copied from another a few pages back

)

My main concerns are /usr, /var and /var/tmp. All of

aCOSwt · Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2010 7:09 am Post subject:

@Zeerak : Being said that everybody is right with his own partition scheeme, I am nevertheless surprised by coherency questions :
1/ You explode var in no less than 5 partitions but you do not make a dedicated one for /tmp ?
2/ You dedicate a specific partition for /usr but none for /opt which is of similar nature ?

Zeerak · Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2010 11:42 am Post subject:

@aCOSwt:

See I knew there was something off about it :-)

Based on my current opt I'd say 7GB should do it. And 900M for /tmp should be well above the necessary
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Beetle B. · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 524

Installing Gentoo on a new computer in the next few days.

Plan on putting / (including /etc) on reiserfs, and everything else as LVM partitions (ext4). That'd be /home, /var, /opt, /usr, and /tmp.

Any reasons ext4 is bad or unsafe?

How big should / be? I currently have it at 2 GB and only 700 MB is used.

How big should /var be? Currently at 10 GB, using 8 GB. I've maxed this out in the past due to things like ccache, so am thinking of 15 GB on the new computer.

And /tmp? Currently at 5 GB, which may be overkill.

I guess getting /var, and /tmp right is not critical, as it'll be under LVM and can be changed later.

Oh, and swap size? I assume not above 1 GB?

Thanks.
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cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

Beetle B. · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 524

Nicias · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 446

I have a new laptop coming with windows installed on it. I plan on keeping that as is, and keeping anything large (media files mostly) where both OS's can see them.

My thoughts about a partition scheme was as follows: I have 4GB ram and 250GB hard drive.

windows 40G
/boot 128M ext2
/ 25G ext3
(extended)
/var 15G reiserfs
swap 4G
20G /home ext3
Remainder /mnt/data FAT32

I'll put /usr/portage, and /tmp onto the /var partition.
Is there anything seriously ill-advised about this?

Catanduva · Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2011 12:09 pm Post subject:

I'm planning on reinstalling gentoo and windows on my pc because my partitions are a mess and i have a lot of space that i don't need in some partitions. I only use windows to record, play and practice guitar (i don't have an amp), so i don't need a lot of space for it.
My current situation:

keenblade · Veteran Joined: 03 Oct 2004 Posts: 1087

Finally, I've got my new dell n3010 with i5, 4gb ram and 320gb harddisk. Now I'm about to create partitions. In my old system, all I did was creating /boot, /, and swap partitions. And it still works great after 4 years with reiserfs, but probably tere is a bit slowdown regards to fragmentation. Now I want more advanced layout for partitions. Here is my partition scheme. What do you think:

avkhatri · n00b Joined: 29 Sep 2010 Posts: 18

I've never dual booted with Gentoo before, and I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track.

My main Hard Drive is 1Tb with Windows loaded on it. Using the Windows disk manager I unallocated about 150 gigs of free space for Linux. When I get to the "preparing disks" section of the Gentoo install guide, do I just select the unallocated space via fdisk and start making my partitions in there as I normally would if I was using the whole HD? Also, when it comes time to setting up Grub is there anything extra that needs to be done other than adding an entry for my Windows partition and pointing it to the right area?

scott1093 · n00b Joined: 04 Aug 2011 Posts: 3

Unfortunately I do not wish to read/Ctrl+F through 29 pages of help so I'm replying.
I'm planning to install Gentoo (which I've done a few times but always on its own) beside Windows 7 on my new laptop. The default partitioning scheme in the gentoo handbook has been and still is sufficient for me but I've got a slight problem. My Windows installation has 2 primary partitions already and for various reasons needs to stay that way. (maximum of 4 primary partitions)

What I want to know is which of the 3 default partitions for Gentoo ( / and /boot and swap ) can safely be set as an extended partition? I'm thinking of making /boot the extended partition with /boot and swap as the last two primary partitions. Quick help would be great. I need to get this install done before I head to college in a week.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2011 8:02 pm Post subject:

scott1093,

Lets sort out some terminolgy, or you will have problems with fdisk when you come to install.

There are three sorts of partitions an MSDOS partition table knows about
1. Primary
You may have at most four primary partitions. The descriptors for this partitions reside in the partition table in the Master Boot Record.
2. Extended
At most one of your primary partitions may be of type extended. An extended partition doesn't really exist and can't be used in the way the other two types can. It serves to reserve disk space so it can't be used by other primary partitions.
3. Logical
Logical partitions are created inside the space reserved by an extended partition.

Linux doesn't care if its partitions are primary or logical. You do not need a /boot partition provided your BIOS can read your entire HDD.
The small /boot partition at the start of the disc is required from time to time in the race between BIOS read ability and hard drive sizes.

Shrink your Windows install if you need to. Donate all the free space to an extended partition, then make logical partitions for your Gentoo install
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Eddi3x3 · Guru Joined: 25 May 2011 Posts: 328

Hey guys, I was hoping that I could get an opinion from you guys about how I should install gentoo in addition to my already running crunchbang linux based off debian
This is my current table
Total 120 GB

/dev/sda1 ext4 / 74GB boot
/dev/sda2 extended 2.79GB
/dev/sda5 linux-swap 2.79GB
unallocated 71.75GB

so Im using Gparted to sort out the unallocated space and grub2 is installed on crunchbang aka sda1;
any suggestions?

nathaniel73 · Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 1:02 pm Post subject:

I'm about to install Gentoo on my laptop for the first time and I currently have Linux Mint installed as the primary OS using

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 5:28 pm Post subject:

nathaniel73,

For the sake of your sanity your should share /boot with all your linux distros. You can have separate /boot partitions but you may only have a single bootloader started by the BIOS and MBR. If you intend to keep Mint, you may as well use its bootloader and add Gentoo to it.

Leave your swap where it is and share it with all your distros *unless* you want to suspend/resume various distros at various times. That a dangerous thing to want to do as you must not access a mounted filesystem somehow else while its involved in a suspend.

Donate your fourth and last primary partition to a partition that owns the rest of the disk
Put that partition into a LVM physical volume group.
Make lvm volumes in your physical volume and put filesystems on the logical volumes.

As you will have root on LVM, you will need an initrd to boot into Gentoo, since you need to get lvm started before you can mount root. The initrd is fairly simple and need not be updated every kernel update as it does not need to contain kernel modules. This Wiki article covers root on raid and lvm with DM-Crypt and does a good job of explaining the initrd. The three parts are quite separate, so its straightforwad to leave out raid and DM-Crypt.
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

nathaniel73 · Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 2:28 am Post subject:

Thanks NeddySeagoon for your detailed reply. I've found the Gentoo LVM2 install guide and am working my way through it and the wiki article now.
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psyhprog · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2011 Posts: 13

I have been using Linux (very basic and sparse) for some time now, and recently decided that I get serious. Since I didn't have any Linux distro installed, and also wanted the installation to be hands-on so I could peek inside the hood, I tried to install gentoo using the guide. I had some issues, but I'm only going to post the one related to partitioning:

Here's my current scheme:

I - 250 GB
100 MB- System Reserved
232,79 GB - Windows (also boot partition etc.)
II - 1 TB
341,80 GB - NTFS - Storage
555,53 GB - NTFS - Storage
Free space 34,18 GB where Gentoo goes

How should I set up Linux? I was thinking of a swap partition and a boot one. Is this okay?

Also, can someone tell me how should I set up grub? At that point, I was completely lost. How to make the entry for Windows, how to specifiy partitions, after installing grub I gave up at the first attempt, and how to manually reinstall the win bootloader.

Thanks for the help,

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 12:45 pm Post subject:

psyhprog,

You don't provide enough detail for us to describe a grub.conf for you.

Boot a linux CD and post the output of

psyhprog · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2011 Posts: 13

Ok, thanks for the reply. I'm going to attempt tomorrow to install it again tomorrow, and when I do that I'm going to post the complete information you need. I think I may also require help with the FSTAB file, but then again that its also tomorrow.

psyhprog · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2011 Posts: 13

Is this right so far?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/853/dsc000471v.jpg/

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 6:20 pm Post subject:

psyhprog,

That fine. 5G for swap is huge but if you plan to use hibernation, swap needs to be at least the same size as your RAM.
You have no separate /boot partition but thats fine too.

When you come to setting /etc/fstab you must not have a line for /boot.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

daglamier22 · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2012 Posts: 3

I am about to do a re-install of my entire system (had originally just chewed out a little space on my HDD to play with gentoo and it turns out i have enjoyed it quite a bit and want to continue learning through it). This time around however I want to do a complete re-install to include my SSD and just a dual boot with win7 (previously it had win 7, ubuntu, and gentoo).

I'm having alot of trouble determining how I should setup my partitions. I have a 90GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. Was considering splitting that SSD between the main OS for win7 and gentoo, and mostly use the HDD for personal data (movies, music, games, and i do some c++ programming as well)

Any good guidelines for this, or possibly personal experiences with a similar setup?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2012 11:36 pm Post subject:

daglamier22,

You should use al least 4 partitions.
/boot, /home, / and <swap>
/boot can be anyware the BIOS can read. Its ony used once at boot time, so need not be on the SSD

How much RAM do you have and do you need hibernation ?
That setermines the size of <swap> and if you should put /var/tmp/portage and /tmp into RAM.
If you keep /var/tmp/portage and /tmp in RAM, everything else can be on the SSD.
Its /var/tmp/portage that is hit hard with writes during building, which may shortenl the life of your SSD.

A separate /home in a primary partition make it easy to preserve user data if you every need to reinstall.

If you feel the need to move space around from one partition to another, consider lvm2.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

daglamier22 · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2012 Posts: 3

Hey, thanks for the quick response.

I have 8 GB RAM. I have yet to ever come close to pushing that entire 8 GB to run into swap, nor do I use hibernation, so i'm assuming swap size shouldn't be too big (although on my previous builds i had gone ahead and used 8GB swap, not sure this is necessary).

I'm guessing /home could be a good size partition on the 1TB HDD(although i need a big chunk of that HDD for dual boot type stuff, like movies and music and such)

Is there a benefit of having /boot on the ssd, does it speed up boot time or anything of the sort?

Look forward to your reply