Get help on partitioning here [Part 2]

wrc1944 · Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2006 4:04 pm Post subject:

enderandrew wrote:

filterpunk · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2006 Posts: 71 Location: Portland, OR

I'm about to install Gentoo on another system, but had a couple issues I could use clarification on that I haven't tried before on Gentoo.

This box has two SATA hard drives (sda and sdb, respectively). My intentions are to install the boot and / partitions on the primary/sda and the swap file and /home on the secondary drive/sdb. I've searched around a bit and didn't encounter anything addressing this particular topic, though i'll freely admit I may have missed something.

Anyway, if i'm assuming correctly, I would just need to run fdisk on /dev/sda and create my boot and / partitions, run fdisk on /dev/sdb and create my swap and /home, and write the table up in /etc/fstab, right? I'm also uncertain whether each of these needs to be noted as a primary partition or whether certain ones need to be extended, etc. Anything within grub (or anywhere else) that needs to differ from the basic setup described in the handbook?

A couple pointers, or confirmation that i'm on track, would be most appreciated.

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

wrc1944 · Posted: Sun Jun 25, 2006 2:25 pm Post subject:

enderandrew,
I had seen that "ext4" site a while back- pretty interesting stuff.

Basically, codergeek42 convinced me to go with a tuned ext3 after I read the entire ext3 tips thread https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-305871-highlight-ext3+tips.html along with a lot of googling around other info sites which confirmed the info. I did give reiser4 a 6 month try last year- maybe it's time for me to try the latest vesion on a fresh Gentoo install, but previously it suffered from the same gradual fragmentation and performance loss reiserfs exhibited. Maybe that's been resolved now. I'll admit reiser4 was great right after a fresh install, but went downhill quickly. And, I got tired of having to patch my kernels, or use a "reiser4" kernel from some body else. I'll probably wait until it's in mainstream, if it ever happens, before I really consider it again. Ext3 tuned has really impressed me, across the board.

It goes without saying dir_index is essential. As for the other options, I use data_journal or data_writeback on various partitions, and different commit intervals ranging fron 60 to 600 seconds, depending on the specific partition's usage requirements. That might be different for each user's systems, depending on what they use a specific partition for. There's a trade-off for larger or smaller commit intervals- larger intervals give better performace but more potential data loss in case of a crash, and with smaller intervals you take a small performance hit, but potentially lose less data when a crash happens (thus the default 5 second interval). I guess they figure most users would rather commit a journal more often, for data integrity.

I can say I've not been sorry I went to ext3 tuned, and have had no compelling reason to consider going back to reiserfs or reiser4. Oh yeah- the ext3 "multiple allocation block" feature was first in recent mm kernels (or you could patch vanilla kernels yourself), but now is merged in 2.6.17 by default, if I'm not mistaken.
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Berticus · n00b Joined: 16 Jan 2006 Posts: 74

I don't typically split my home directory from the root directory. I've actually been avoiding it with pretty much every OS I've installed. Yeah kinda weird cuz that means I have to backup everything... I guess I just don't want to have to decide how much space home and the rest of the filesystem should have. Actually I typically just make a swap and root partition...

Anyway, I've got 250 gigs of space. I'm going to have 32 M for the boot partition, 128 for the swap, and I'm not sure how I'm going to divide it between home and the rest of the filesystem. I know home's gonna be much more. Right now, /usr/local, which is where I install all of my programs, takes up 879.7 MB, while home takes up 30.3 GB. This is on the family's computer, which is only 60 gigs. So does 50 GB for root and 204640 MB for home sound good?

bol · Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2006 8:41 am Post subject:

Well, i guess it's my turn to ask about my disk-configuration then.

Any suggestions about improvement are welcome.

Berder · n00b Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 11

I'm trying to install Gentoo from a live CD in the absence of an internet connection--my wireless adapter card only has windows drivers. The other operating system on this computer is windows xp. My problem is that when I get to the partition screen in gentoo, the only drive it can find only has about 75 megabytes available. My hard drive is 80 GB and I've only used 12 GB. I tried to make a primary partition of the drive in windows but it doesn't allow me to do that (and doesn't say why). I'm clueless--what should I be doing? Where should I be looking for information?

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 4:26 am Post subject:

Hi and welcome to the forums.

If you're using fdisk /dev/hda to partition your disk, that means that your cd-rom is the master on the primary channel. Do fdisk -l to see how your disk is called. It should be /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc or /dev/sda.
If you need help to install Gentoo, you should start by reading the Gentoo HandBook.
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ilm · Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 5:26 am Post subject:

I'm going to be dual-booting gentoo with XP on my laptop, which I'm probably going to upgrade to a 100 gig hard drive. I'm thinking of doing a 40gig XP partition (which I find is the absolute minimum I need), 20 gig shared FAT32 and then 40 gig for gentoo. I know XP needs to be first, but would I be better off having gentoo second or the shared partition second?

Since its a laptop, I was considering using the suspend2 kernel, which requires the swap to be 2*RAM. However, I might upgrade the RAM down the line from 512 to 1 gig (when I get the money :wink:

), so should I make my swap 2gig straight from the word go?

Also, would I be better off with 1 big / partion, or splitting off a seperate /home partition? One of my reasons for choosing gentoo is so that I'll finally have an OS I don't have to keep re-installing :wink:

. As such, one large partition will enable me to not worry about how much to allocate, but a seperate /home will make restoring crashed OS's helpful. Thoughts? Note that I won't be doing any video editing or having a lot of music, so I don't need to worry about keeping space for that.

Finally, with regards to the /boot: is this used primarily just to keep the kernel in one place? My laptops a centrino, so I don't envisage hardware limitations to be a problem. I'm more than happy to put it in if I need it, but how big should it be?

Thanks for all your (anticipated) help!!!

Berder · n00b Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 11

I'm not sure just how partitioning works with existing files. Right now I have a 76 GB ntfs partition that is for Windows of which I am using 12. I see something called "ntfsresize" that says it may non-destructively reduce the size of the Windows partition. Does it really do that? Also it mentions defragmenting--if I defragment first is there a safe way to do the partition without trusting a downloaded utility?

For some reason, I can't use the Windows utility Diskpart to create a new partition. I try

DISKPART> create partition primary size=20000

and it replies instantly

DiskPart was unable to create the specified partition.

Is this because my drive is fragmented? But that doesn't seem likely because diskpart doesn't require any time to craft its reply, and also when I try create partition primary size=1 it doesn't work either.

Also, I tried to use fdisk from the gentoo on the livecd as jbmsvicetto said but it does not recognize the command.

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2006 4:08 am Post subject:

Berder,

if you're new to Linux and partitioning, you should make backups of your important information before creating, deleting or resizing partitions. I strongly encourage you to read the Gentoo Handbook and to post specific questions before partitioning the disk. Before you can create a partition on a disk, you must have some free space available. If you used your entire disk for your partitions(s), you will need to resize them or delete some. Before you try to resize any partition, you should run the disk defrag on Windows to straighten your disk. You can run disk defrag, by opening windows explorer, with the right mouse-button over your disk choose properties, select tools and the disk defrag. Before trying to resize any disk, you should backup all your info as if something goes wrong you may hose the entire disk. If you don't want to take any chances and have a spare disk, it's safer to use a new disk for Gentoo. You might also disconnect the other disks to avoid any data loss.
When creating new partitions for Gentoo, you should use the Linux fdisk. What do you get when you run as root fdisk -l? That is a small L and not a 1. If you're using the GLI, you should open a term and do sudo su - and then run fdisk -l.
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Berder · n00b Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 11

fdisk does run normally if I type sudo su first.

My question is at this point, how do I best resize a disk partition that is already being used by Windows, without destroying information? The Windows utility DiskPart does not seem to be capable of it. There are a couple utilities I can download and use to do this either in windows or linux, although I can't use the linux one because linux on the livecd doesn't yet recognize either my wireless adapter or my alternate CD drive so I have no way of getting information to it. But--are these utilities safe, and is there a better, more "official" way? The Linux one is ntfsresize, and the Windows one is described at http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/mssct.html.
Also there is
http://www.partition-manager.com/demo.htm

Berder · n00b Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 11

By the way, thanks a lot for telling me about sudo. Without that I'd still be at step 1.

OK, I used ntfsresize in combination with fdisk and I have a few questions about that.
1. There's no way to actually "resize" a partition in fdisk other than deleting the partition and creating a new one--or am I missing something?
2. What is the size of a "cylinder"? In ntfsresize I had to specify the new partition size in GB but in fdisk my only option was in "cylinders." Figuring the number of cylinders should be proportional to the number of GB, even though I don't get an even division, I used cylinders 7-6100 out of 9719 total for 50 GB. How close is this?
3. After I specified the number of cylinders for the remade partition, fdisk put me back at its prompt without asking me what kind of filesystem I wanted on the partition. I guess it must have defaulted back to ntfs, but is this expected?
4. After using fdisk I did fdisk -l again but it showed the same information that it did before I deleted the partition and remade it smaller. That is, it still showed an 80 GB partition. Is this expected?
5. When I booted into Windows, the first thing I saw was the Windows CHKDSK utility telling me that the drive is "dirty." After CHKDSK did its thing, the computer rebooted and successfully started Windows. The drive information for C: is now total space about 45 GB, so everything seems fine so far. But given CHKDSK thought there was a problem, is there a reason to worry?

Something that may be relevant: before I did all this, I tried running ntfsresize but it told me that there were some corrupted clusters on the disk. I got rid of those using CHKDSK before doing the rest of the stuff.

Edit: Ok, something is wrong. Here is what I get when I do fdisk /dev/sda2 and type p for partition list:

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:55 am Post subject:

Berder,

you run fdisk on disks and not on partitions. Therefore, you should run fdisk /dev/sda, instead of fdisk /dev/sda2
1 - fdisk doesn't support resizing partitions by itself. GNU parted allows that for some Linux filesystems. qtparted is capable of doing that on ntfs. One of the reasons I keep a cd from sysrescue cd around is to run qtparted. As I've told you, before thinking on doing something like this, make sure you backup all your info - better safe than sorry!
2 - You can always input sizes to fdisk by using the +sizeMB or +sizeGB.
3 - fdisk doesn't create filesystems. If you use parted it can do that for you. With fdisk you'll need to run something like mkfs.ext2, mkfs.reiserfs or mkfs.jfs to create a filesystem on the partition.
4 - fdisk only saves your changes if you exit it by pressing "w". If you press "q", all your changes will be lost.
5 - It seems you went ahead and resized the partition or so I gather from this point.
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Berder · n00b Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 11

OK, I didn't press w so I guess I must not have made any changes. But then what's the reason Windows is only showing a 50 GB c-drive now? Did ntfsresize do that?

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 1:53 am Post subject:

Berder · n00b Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 11

OK, well thanks for your help with sudo and fdisk (I later did find sudo in the handbook-missed it the first time). Everything to do with partitions looks like it's good now. I have some other problems but I'll make a new thread.

Ariem · Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 3:30 pm Post subject:

Hi, I need a quick help for a simple question.

My disk now looks like this:

rwescoat · n00b Joined: 26 Sep 2004 Posts: 41 Location: /dev/null

Hi there. I'm getting back into Gentoo and I've decided to redo my partitioning scheme. My system has a single 60gb HDD.

I've decided that I don't want to do a single filesystem this time, I want to have separate partitions. It'd be great if you all could recommend some sizes for /, /usr, and /var.

Partitions:

Be sure to let me know if this is too vague. I'm not looking for exact sizes, just general recommendations.

Thanks,
rwescoat

pyrho · n00b Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 30 Location: Paris, France

Hi all !

I've just reinstall windows with 2 partitions ( one contains Windows, the other one contains my data ).
Then I tried to install gentoo, which requires 3 partitions, here's my problem I can only create 4 primary partitions, and the installation guide says that I must create primary partitions.
So what can I do ?

Thx for any eventual brainstorm ^^.

--
pyrho

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 8:53 pm Post subject:

[mod]Merged above post here[/mod]

pyrho,
you must have misread the installation guide. Are you using this Guide?
You are limited to the 4 primary partitions, but one of them can be an extended partition where you can create logical partitions. Although Windows requires the booting partition be a primary partition, you can safely install Linux on logical drives.
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pyrho · n00b Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 30 Location: Paris, France

That was the guide i was following, but i never read the beginning of the "preparing the disk" part ^^ my wrong sorry.
So if i got it right, i must create a extended partition an (since i have 2 windows partitions it will be /dev/hda3), and inside this extended partition, i can create 3 logical partitions for gentoo ?
edit: Thx a lot for the quickness and the 'pedagogy' of your reply ^^

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 9:34 pm Post subject:

Yes, you can create an extended partition at /dev/hda3 and create your Linux partitions as logical partitions.
My pleasure to help!

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Your twisted, but hopefully friendly daemon.
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