Partitioning Advice

Recrof · 2006-09-30 16:04:47

I recently purchased a laptop with an 120GB hard drive and wanted to put Linux on it ASAP. Arch looks to be a great distribution and I look forward to using it.

Anyway, due to the former hidden restore partition I don't like how the drive is set up. I also don't want to redo the system as I spent a great deal configuring Windows to my liking assuming that Windows was taking up the first section of the disk.

The partition table is as follows:

7GB Free space | 30 for Windows | 80ish GBs Free space

It's a single drive and that Windows partition sort of sits in the middle so all of the free space isn't grouped together as I would like it to be.

I was wondering how I could make the best use of that 7GBs of free space that's "by itself". I planned to use 2Gb for swap (laptop has 1GB RAM) but that only leaves 5 left over. I was thinking of maybe using it for /var but that's sort of unnecessary for this system.

Anyway, I'm open to all suggestions. Thanks.

vacant · 2006-09-30 16:27:49

I've run Arch on several PCs over the years and my main PC has two Arch installations. A full gui install starts off around 2.5 GB and my pacman repository is 1GB (so I can feed other Arch installs). 6GB is a comfortable minimum if you put your /home somewhere else (if you're going to store movies etc there).

With 1GB RAM I doubt you'll ever see any swap file space getting used so why bother?

toxic · 2006-09-30 17:46:54

Personally, I'd try out partition magic for windows (not sure if gparted or any other linux partition manager can handle this) and move those 7 GB's of free space to sit with the other 80.

Otherwise you can always install arch on 7 GB and your /home elsewhere like vacant said. But still, I'd recomend having 20% free disk space (at least) on any partition of which you choose to install an OS. So the best would probably be to install arch in the large partition, then see if you could move the smaller one, or have it acting as a mp3 library or whatever.

Vacant, I have one GB of RAM, using fluxbox and have around 35-40MB of RAM allocated after I started X. It's probably true what you say, that it's unlikely to exceed 1GB in arch, but it's always possible. A few CAD tools and some downloading using Memory as a middlestep *might* fill up the ram.
Would be interesting to see what it would take though, perhaps I'll try one day to fill it, and of course, not by cheating with RAMdisk or anything

vacant · 2006-09-30 19:03:39

toxic wrote:

Would be interesting to see what it would take though, perhaps I'll try one day to fill it, and of course, not by cheating with RAMdisk or anything

Post the results if you get around to it . I've got 768MB RAM and looking at "KInfocenter" I see I'm using 23% for application data (firefox, kmail, kde desktop with bells, whistles, applets) and 19% disk cache leaving around 50% free. Eventually disk cache goes up until it stabilises leaving 20% RAM free.

Of course there wouldn't be much to be gained by writing disk cache out to swap as lots of disk reads are "one-offs" and with every fresh non-cached read made, the heads have to move, so I reckon I'd really I'd have to fill my RAM with application data, i.e. have lots of apps not only open, but processing concurrently before a swap partition was of any benefit.

If you had a drive used just for swap, then you might notice a difference reading from a 1GB contiguous medium, uninterrupted by head movement to other parts for the disk for fresh reads.

Recrof · 2006-10-01 13:21:20

Thanks, I went ahead and tried Partition Magic 8 and it worked great .

As for the 2GB swap size; I wanted extra just to be safe, it's for hibernating the laptop. This is my first Linux install on a laptop so this area is new to me, 1GB will probably be fine though.

waltm · 2006-10-01 13:28:23

be careful with repartitioning that free 7 gigabyte partition. It might be the recovery parition for xp. messing with it will make running XP even more risky.

Before doing anything, make your XP recovery discs the manual for laptop or vendors support pages should have details on how to.

next get a live linux CD (or use the arch install CD) to boot and examine the partiton layout, e.g. fdisk -l /dev/hda. My experience has been that the recovery partition is hda1, while the xp partition is hda2.

the second partition is the one to resize.

good luck, make lots of backups, YMMV etc

toxic · 2006-10-01 14:24:47

waltm wrote:

be careful with repartitioning that free 7 gigabyte partition. It might be the recovery parition for xp. messing with it will make running XP even more risky.

XP would likely not need 7GB for a backup partition anyway. The only reason for such would be if the computet was shipped with a OEM license, in which an extra partition is created to store some windows file for possible recovery. This partition isn't anywhere near 7GB though.

arch_mike · 2006-10-01 17:21:14

Why not make a /tmp folder , for windows and for linux , saves issues , all the garbage is on a seperate partition I have always done that , it stops malicious behaviors such as tmp attacks :idea:

Recrof · 2006-10-02 07:28:51

waltm wrote:

be careful with repartitioning that free 7 gigabyte partition. It might be the recovery parition for xp. messing with it will make running XP even more risky.
Before doing anything, make your XP recovery discs the manual for laptop or vendors support pages should have details on how to.
next get a live linux CD (or use the arch install CD) to boot and examine the partiton layout, e.g. fdisk -l /dev/hda. My experience has been that the recovery partition is hda1, while the xp partition is hda2.
the second partition is the one to resize.
good luck, make lots of backups, YMMV etc

Yeah, it was the recovery partition - I had stated that in my first post. I had already made a backup restore DVD so no worries . I don't use Windows for much besides a few games anyway, I just wanted to avoid an annoying reinstall. Everything is partitoned and Arch is currently getting installed .

Arch Linux

#1 2006-09-30 16:04:47

Partitioning Advice

#2 2006-09-30 16:27:49

Re: Partitioning Advice

#3 2006-09-30 17:46:54

Re: Partitioning Advice

#4 2006-09-30 19:03:39

Re: Partitioning Advice

#5 2006-10-01 13:21:20

Re: Partitioning Advice

#6 2006-10-01 13:28:23

Re: Partitioning Advice

#7 2006-10-01 14:24:47

Re: Partitioning Advice

#8 2006-10-01 17:21:14

Re: Partitioning Advice

#9 2006-10-02 07:28:51

Re: Partitioning Advice

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