How should I "structure" my large hard drive?

[StevenVI]

This is more of a general computing question I think, but ... also related to Linux .

I just got a new 200GB hard drive and shortly after learned that my BIOS is old and has no updates and cannot identify a drive larger than 127GB, and therefore refuses to boot from any disk on that ribbon. To avert this problem, I've made a GRUB boot floppy disk. Ahh, lots of extra space now.

But, at the moment, I have my new disk structured with 4 partitions: teeny Win98, teenier boot section, small swap space, and the rest of it is for "everything else." (I'm giving my "small" 60GB drive which I currently use to my brother, who suffers with 2GB.) Now I don't know if it's the drive -- I don't know all too much about hard disks, the access time was advertised as 9ms -- but sometimes accessing files takes forever on it. If I were to split up the "everything else" space into smaller 45GB sections or so, and mounted them all at /, would Linux handle things kindly? Would there be any problems? Would this help with the speed problem?

Thanks for the help!
-Steven

[imptech]

You most definitely can't mount a bunch of partitions all at '/'. One partition to a path, thats the rule. You could make /home, /usr, /opt, etc, if you wanted to. I really don't think it will do anything for your disk speed though. My guesses on that would be maybe you're not enabling DMA, or maybe its just a slow drive. 9ms seems like a reasonable access time (I'm guessing 7200RPM drive), but of course that doesn't tell you the whole story about drive performance by a longshot.

[StevenVI]

Aww poop... that's no fair

Well, with regards to the speed issue, it's 7200RPM, Ultra ATA-100 interface, 8MB buffer, and average seek time is "<9.5" (I was incorrect in my last post.)

When I use hdparm to test the access speeds (-tT), it always reports better performance than the older drive which always has given good performance. Further, hdparm says that DMA is enabled. This is the output it gives me (more or less, anyways, I'm writing this on my laptop.)

[imptech]

I was actually just going to mention that as a possibility... having noticed the '/dev/hdb'. Although from what I've read, that really shouldn't be a problem for an even remotely modern ATA controller. Of course, I still give my drives their own channel whenever possible, and it *seems* to make a difference in my completely subjective opinion.

In any event, everything else looks to be in order, so if its not the master/slave issue or you imagining things, I have no idea.

[StevenVI]

Hmm. Well I tried making the new drive the master with the old one as slave just in case there were problems with the stuff I had copied over. Now I have a boot disk for GRUB so that it can boot the disk and then read from the hard drive the boot menu and everything, because of the problem mentioned earlier where my BIOS refuses to boot anything on the same IDE ribbon as the new drive.

So I was able to use the disk to boot the old drive up from that drive's boot partition back when the old drive was master, but with the new drive as master the boot disk doesn't want to boot from the new drive's boot partition. Is this a known problem with GRUB or am I just perhaps doing something wrong? GRUB's documentation seemed to hint at the BIOS being the cause of any problems accessing larger disks, but then it also seemed pretty archaic, calling 8GB large .