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Hi,
I'm really starting to like Arch, and am thinking about installing it on my main box, which is an AMD64.
I am using two disks and have one spare, waiting to be formatted. My /home partition is populated and I need to retain this data.
The following illustrates my current partitioning, and I was wondering whether anyone has any good ideas for an Arch install?
My spare HDD would prompt me to think about RAID, but i'm not comfortable with this, due to my lack of knowledge regarding rebuilding, should something fail.
I'd appreciate any advice.
Cheers,
Chris.
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Current /etc/fstab:
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sdc2
UUID=19c9d49c-3ba0-4b3b-ab3e-92caece31464 / ext3 relatime,error
s=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sda1
UUID=884c7c84-2102-4833-9422-7fb9b4636ad0 /boot ext2 relatime
0 2
# /dev/sda2
UUID=07963f00-36ee-4b03-b8cd-ca286bfb56e6 /home ext3 relatime
0 2
# /dev/sdc1
UUID=9268e17f-bba8-487b-8746-33b5e17eb04e none swap sw
0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
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df -h:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc2 6.9G 3.4G 3.2G 52% /
tmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1.5G 108K 1.5G 1% /var/run
varlock 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /var/lock
udev 1.5G 2.9M 1.5G 1% /dev
tmpfs 1.5G 576K 1.5G 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1.5G 2.4M 1.5G 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-11-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1 89M 38M 46M 45% /boot
/dev/sda2 76G 60G 12G 85% /home
-------------------------
dmesg looks like this:
scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA Maxtor 6Y080L0 YAR4 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 ... 80Gb (sda)
scsi 4:0:1:0: Direct-Access ATA Maxtor 6L080L0 BAJ4 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 .... 80 Gb (sdb- I think) >>>> UNUSED
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA SAMSUNG SV0844A JY10 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 ...8.4 Gb (sdc)
Last edited by chris_debian (2009-03-03 10:29:24)
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Why don't you simply re-use the partitions that you have? I am assuming that you currently have Debian installed on it.
sdc2 as root, sdc 1 as swap sda1 as boot and make sure that you do NOT format sda2 (which is your home) and mount it as your home during your installation process.
I would make an additional partition for /var - with a reiserfs filesystem.
Last edited by Inxsible (2009-03-02 16:07:20)
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !
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This was my first idea. I'm wondering whether I should do something with my spare 80gig HDD, or just to move it to another machine. I haven't used reiserfs, I'll have a look at Wiki and see what the advantages are.
Many thanks,
Chris.
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This was my first idea. I'm wondering whether I should do something with my spare 80gig HDD, or just to move it to another machine. I haven't used reiserfs, I'll have a look at Wiki and see what the advantages are.
Many thanks,
Chris.
you can use the spare 80 Gs for a shared media drive or something, if you dual boot. If not, it could just be a media drive containing your music and movies. However, if you home drive is big enough, then you can use that drive in some other machine.
reseirfs is better suited for large number of files that are small in size. That's what the /var partition contains.
Last edited by Inxsible (2009-03-02 17:15:22)
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !
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Thanks for that. I don't dual boot, but could use the drive for something like photos/ music/ movies. Thanks for explaining the ReiserFS thing. Wikipedia was funny. The story about the creator reminded me of the interesting goings on.
Maybe I could use on the 2nd drive. I'd have to work out how to do it, though.
Cheers,
Chris.
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Thanks for that. I don't dual boot, but could use the drive for something like photos/ music/ movies. Thanks for explaining the ReiserFS thing. Wikipedia was funny. The story about the creator reminded me of the interesting goings on.
Maybe I could use on the 2nd drive. I'd have to work out how to do it, though.
Cheers,
Chris.
Keep in mind the difference between reiser4 and reiserfs. reiser4 is the newer filesystem and I don't know if htere are bugs. reiserfs is the tried and tested filesystem for partitions such as /var
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !
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Will do. Time to Google LVM + Arch, now.
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Had a look at the Arch wiki. Am I right in thinking that I could preserve the data on my home partition, if I did an install using /boot and LVM?
Help appreciated.
Chris.
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Brainwave- maybe I could use my spare disk to back-up my /home partition on a regular basis, in-case my /home becomes corrupted.
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Had a look at the Arch wiki. Am I right in thinking that I could preserve the data on my home partition, if I did an install using /boot and LVM?
Help appreciated.
Chris.
Sure you can. I have /boot on its own partition and everything else on LVM, including a logical volume for /home. I don't recall the procedure I used to retain my existing data; I probably did a full copy/restore. The only downside to LVM I've encountered so far (after several years) is compatibility: not all Linux distributions will install to LVM. Arch doesn't have that problem, though.
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That sounds encouraging.
Many thanks.
Chris.
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