Best way to partition my harddrive?

[Stanley56]

Hi,

I'v been using gentoo for some time now and I'm planning to repartition my 2 harddrives. The first one is an 80 GB drive and the second one a 40 GB.
At the moment both gentoo and win xp are installed on the 80 gb drive, but at some point my partition table on the second drive got damaged and I can't use 15 gb of that drive. To solve the problem the drive must completely be erased, so I thought why not put gentoo on that drive. That way I can install and optimize gentoo on that disc first before I remove my existend distro. After that I will erase the old distro and reinstall windows too. My problem is not how to do it, but how should my partition sheme look like?

for the moment:
hda1: /boot
hda2: Windows C
hda3: /
hda5: Windows D
hda6: Windows E
hdb: Doesn't matter (needs to be completely erased)

I'm also planning to use LVM

Any suggestions?
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[madchaz]

Personaly, I would stick the /boot and Windows c: in first, both as primary.
It makes working with boot easier. I'd also keep both small as possible. Maybe giving c: just enough space to put the swap file on it and nothing else.

then probably put the root / next
put windows D where you will install teh OS itself. after that, it's pretty much your call

I'd personaly try to put HDB as a single fat32 partition. this way, you can use it to swap data between the OSs
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[Stanley56]

good suggestion. But how much space should I give my linux? I'm planning to use it as a desktop. 20GB?
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[madchaz]

if you want to use it as your main desktop, I'd say give it about 15 or 20 gig. you could also keep a larger portion of your 80 gig for, say, your document's folder. by making it a fat32 partition, you can put both /home/username/Documents and the windows "my document" folder on the same place. Makes for much smoother switch between the 2
_________________
Someone asked me once if I suffered from mental illness. I told him I enjoyed every second of it.
www.madchaz.com A small candle of a website. As my lab specs on it.

[Stanley56]

Thanks for your reply, I think i'm going to make it the following:

hda: (80Gb)
- /boot (50Mb)
- winxp drive C (10Gb)
- swap (256Mb)
extended:
|- / (500Mb)
|- LVM (15Gb) (/usr, /home, /var, /opt, /tmp)
|- winxp d (win prg dir) (10Gb)
|- winxp e (documents) (the rest) (bit much isn't it?)

hdb: (40Gb)
- Downloads + tmp files (fat32)

btw: madchaz, your from cadada?
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[Gherald2]

Ok I have a few related questions. This is my first *nix install; here are my drive, partition, raid, and filesystem setups so far:

[Stanley56]

You should post this as a new subject. That way the others wouldn't be mislead by the title.

I don't know anything about RAID, but the symlink doesn't make sense to me. If you have any questions about LVM, just ask...
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[Gherald2]

*sigh, I've been trying to avoid LVM as it looks somewhat complex. RAID is hard enough without adding additional levels of abstraction... yet maybe LVM is what I need.

But why wouldn't symlinks make sense?


Anyway, I've thought about your partitioning scheme a bit and I think I'd be inclined to do things a little differently if I was starting from scratch with your drives and setting up only XP and Gentoo:

hda: (80Gb)
- winxp C (sys + win prg dir) (30Gb)
- /boot (50Mb)
- /swap (2*RAM)
extended:
| - / (1Gb)
| - LVM (20Gb) (/usr, /home, /var, /opt, /tmp)
| - winxp D && /home/win (documents) (rest)

hdb: (40Gb)
- Downloads + tmp files (fat32)

And that's being a little conservative... I'd consider rearranging things further if I knew how your 80 and 40 drives compare (make/model/RPM/cache/etc)

[Stanley56]

[Gherald2]

I actually reinstall XP fairly often (on a seperate machine) and I generally like to reinstall all my programs as well.

I just have a backup .bat file that copies all my settings to a seperate drive.

Comes in handy...

I guess I just hate having four hard drives (C to F) under Windows. It's a habit I picked up from the old days, I guess, when something as simple as adding a CDROM drive would mess up all your drive letters.

[Noth]

I just want to point a few things out as I tend to run alot of still in development stuff.

Do what you want for for the windows partitions it doesn't really matter

You do need a /boot partition (but I think you already know that).
Acording to the gentoo security guide, and the more traditinial way. Is to set /, /home, /var, /tmp, and /usr as their own partition. With LVM you still need to do this. You would create one type 0xe8 (I think) partition, then create LVM partitions inside of that.

LVM is easy to use, there are some very good how-to's floating around, which I believe are still valid for LVM2. If you may EVER move to a 2.6 kernel you must use LVM2. Also if using a 2.6 kernel you can no longer have a root "/" LVM partition. LVM in the 2.6 kernel has been moved to userland. Consaquently you can't get to the program till / is mounted, and you can't mount / till you have the program loaded.....etc...

I find it easier to use a RAID mode 0, or software RAID mode 0. and suggest the same if you have more then one disk of the same or close size.

If you don't have multiple disks. I will assume you want LVM for its ability to resize partitions, this of course can not be done on the fly, you must first umount them. If doing this to an importent dir et.(/var, or /tmp) you will most likely have to boot and work from the livecd. I don't suggest using this unless you plan to add more hard drives at a later time.

For ease of space managment with the same effect as following the gentoo security guide, I would recomend just a root partition "/". While using an ACL system such as grsec or SELinux. The easiest one of those two is grsec. Grsec has just recently released its patch for the 2.6.4 kernel, there is no ebuild as of yet, patch will apply to the vanilla kernel but not the -mm. If you want to go with SELinux then you will have to use reiserfs4 or it will not work. I recomend using it anyway! The stable branch was supposed to have been out of testing last month "03/2004" but has not yet been released as such. There are Ebuilds for it currently masked.

Edit* The last paragraph brings about a small caveat.. ok so its large. Without a seperate /home partition, if things screw up really badly while your playing around to the point it is just easier to reformat the drive, you will loose all your saved files. So make a 10Gb "/" and give the rest of the space to a "/home" partition. a 10Gb "/" is not "needed", but would give you plenty of room for source files, logs, ccache if you choose to install it, and other things.


I also have seem a few posts were people have so many partitions on one disk that it broke the FAT, and the system would not load after reboot. This was justified by knowing where all the space is going and being able to control were it goes. Nothing wrong with that reasoning! But if you want that you should use disk quotas thats whay it is there. Again reiserfs4 has it native, reiser3 (the standerd gentoo reiserfs) would need it patched (I just saw today 04/09 a just posted query of someone asking if there is any interaste in him posting a how-to to get reiser3 with quotas working), works also with ext2, ext3, and I belive XFS.

Swap
Again traditionaly you would use x2 the amount of ram in your system. This is no longer needed really. If you have at least 500mb of ram you will probably never touch the swap file, unless you are running really big graphical/Video editing software, or large databases. So drop the size to 500mb of swap if you want to play it safe or if you would like to actualy use that space you have paid for, don't have one at all. Some people might point out that things are getting bigger, for instence Unreal Tournament 2004, has an option to precache all skins into memory. It suggest you to have at least 500mb of ram for this. If you only have 500mb of ram then there is a good chance of your swap being used here. But if it is some of the UT game files or files it will need during play, it will just slow you down. So be smart don't select options in programs that are more then your system can chew.

I think thats about it. Have fun!
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[Stanley56]

you can make partitions larger without unmounting them.
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"In a world without fences, who needs gates?"

[Noth]

[Stanley56]

only use ext3 for /boot
all the rest:
linux -> reiserfs
win -> fat32
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"In a world without fences, who needs gates?"

[Gherald2]

NTFS for winxp sys and programs ...?

[Stanley56]

no thanks
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"In a world without fences, who needs gates?"

[nixnut]

[Noth]