how should i partition my HD?

dids22 · 2007-07-22 15:52:15

i have 250 Giga
i already have a partition for windows (20G)
to make 1 big partition?

funkyou · 2007-07-22 17:34:59

I would suggest that you dont use just one big partition, but create an own partition for /home at least. So you can reinstall if something is broken and dont loose your data...

Here is my setup:

sda1 - windows (40gb)
sda5 - arch / (10gb ext3)
sda6 - arch /var (10gb reiserfs)
sda7 - arch /opt (30gb ext3)
sda8 - arch /home (159gb ext3)
sda9 - arch swap (1gb)

ReiserFS is used for /var because i found its faster for me than ext3 (even with dir_index and other stuff) when using pacman. /opt is a little bigger because i store all my linux games there...

dids22 · 2007-07-22 18:10:14

/var -> this partition is for the package you download?

/opt - > you said you using it for games, why won`t on /home?

/boot -> for what is it needed?

and what about ext2/4 why not using it?

funkyou · 2007-07-22 18:33:58

/var -> this partition is for the package you download?

pacman stores its package database in /var/lib/pacman and caches the downloaded packages in /var/cache/pacman/pkg. Also the sources for packages built with makepkg are stored by default in /var/cache/pacman/src.

10gb should be more than enough for this. I created an own partition for it because i wanted to use reiser (which makes pacmans db access faster on my machine) and ext3 on every other partition.

/opt - > you said you using it for games, why won`t on /home?

Of course you can store your games in your /home... Its just a matter of preference, and i prefer to have no apps/games in my /home but use /opt for that and chown the games to my user where its required. Planeshift for example has an internal updater, so you need to have the proper rights...

/boot -> for what is it needed?

I never used a boot partition so far so i cant tell you that much about... AFAIK its used when you use a more exotic fs like xfs/jfs that cannot be read by grub for your root partition. The boot partition is usually ext2 for maximum compatibility and gives you the ability to boot from filesystems that are not supported by your boot loader. There may be more advantages, but i dont know them

and what about ext2/4 why not using it?

ext2 has no journaling, so your data is not as safe as compared to ext3... ext4 is in development and unstable, and as far as i know you cant use it with archs installer yet...

As said, its all a matter of preference and how you like it. The minimum i would suggest is a separate /home partition...

George_K · 2007-07-22 20:02:33

There is some information here: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tec … ing_Layout
I would suggest to have at least separate "home" partition. Also you may want to have swap space>=RAM to use suspend to disk, but this is not necessary because there is suspend to file. And I suggest to have separate boot partition (~60Mb ext2) and a big partition (at least 150 Gb) for your media and other big stuff. Also it is good to have one more partition (~10 Gb) for temporary stuff - for testing filesystems, distributions or backing up, for example recently I easily switched from xfs to reiser4 with compression for root (/). 10-15 Gb is enough for root partition if you have separate /home and /opt. But you don`t need to have /opt as a separate partition - it can be symlinked to big media partition.

Last edited by George_K (2007-07-22 20:05:07)

T-Dawg · 2007-07-23 00:43:56

funkyou wrote:

ext2 has no journaling, so your data is not as safe as compared to ext3...

Not true. Ext2 has no journal which only means it will take longer than ext3 to check the file system for errors. It has to physically check each sector for errors versus taking a quick look at the journal. Ext2 still has it uses. For example the boot partition where only a small amount of data is dealt with at a time and quick and short lived mounts without the overhead of a journal are desired.
As mentioned above ext4 is still in development and it primary purpose is to extend the maximum storage capacity of ext3. Reiser 3.6 is a quick and fairly reliable filesystem although many question its stability to that of ext3. Reiser4 has been known to be a bit trouble some and/or premature and I believe its development has been put on hold for the time being. XFS and JFS are left. I don't know much about JFS but XFS uses extensive data caching before writes to greatly improve file system fragmentation. The problem with that is your data is more prone being lost during power outages.

George_K · 2007-07-23 06:21:08

Sorry for offtopic, but here is a good article about tweaking xfs: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1479435

Davigetto · 2007-07-23 06:58:14

I am simplier on partitions:

10 GB for / (for me is good, i can install lots of programs and games)
1 GB for swap (i don't need more, i never use it)
the rest for /home

Greetings

nikron · 2007-07-23 13:21:39

I just have
107GB for /
1 GB for swap
40 GB for windows

Gilneas · 2007-07-23 16:42:22

I did a pretty simple setup too:
Root: 132 GB ext3
Boot: 250 MB ext2
Swap: 500 MB
Windows: 15 GB

Pacman performed subpar qua speed so I used pacman-cage. (the size of /var/lib/pacman went from 80 MB to 17 MB!)
The Windows drive is no longer in use, so I may turn it into two partitions for /var and /tmp. It's too late to put /home in a seperate one

Fophillips · 2007-07-23 23:58:30

dids22 wrote:

/boot -> for what is it needed?

So you don't have to reinstall the bootloader, or write over the MBR when you install a new distro, for example. You just need to add an entry to menu.lst

dolby · 2007-07-24 00:23:17

a boot partition is also useful when using an ecrypted root or lvm2

t12ek · 2007-07-24 02:54:17

Gilneas wrote:

It's too late to put /home in a seperate one

Not so, you should be able to use (g)parted to resize your root partition, copy /home to the new partition (the -a flag SHOULD do the trick), move the old home, edit fstab, and you should be all set. You probably to do this from a LiveCD or something, so you can move/delete the old /home without it complaining or doing weird stuff on you.

I haven't tried this myself, but, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

shen · 2007-07-24 15:44:33

what's everyones opinion on the use of a swap partition on a system with more then 1 gig of ram is suspend will not be used?

vacant · 2007-07-24 16:09:32

shen wrote:

what's everyones opinion on the use of a swap partition on a system with more then 1 gig of ram is suspend will not be used?

If you like the security blanket of swap disk space, why not have a 1GB swap file? Then if you ever see it being used on a regular basis (video editing perhaps?) you could make a swap partition which might be marginally faster than a swap file according to benchmarks - I doubt you'd notice it subjectively otherwise.

vacant · 2007-07-24 16:15:10

Fophillips wrote:

dids22 wrote:
/boot -> for what is it needed?
So you don't have to reinstall the bootloader, or write over the MBR when you install a new distro, for example. You just need to add an entry to menu.lst

I've never trusted that. How many distros want to copy /boot/vmlinuz26? Bound to be some installers that get it wrong and don't ask first. I prefer to keep each distro's kernel on its root. I use a Puppy Linux livecd to muck around and install grub.

Robertek · 2007-07-31 18:19:29

Boot partition is good when you want place / whereever you want. And I have it premanently unmounted not to make some mistake here because I work a lot as root making changes.

This is my layout
sda1 /boot ext3 100M
sda5 /home/robert/docs ext3 9G
sda6 /home/robert/downloads ext4 40G
sda7 archbackup ext4
sda8 /home ext4 1G
sda9 /opt ext4 3G
sda10 swap 500M
sda11 /usr/lib ext4 1.3G

sdb5 / ext4 3G
sdb6 /usr/src ext4 2G
sdb7 /var ext4 2,5G
sdb8 /home/robert/music ext3 70G

Why I use ext4? Because I want to test it an because with extents it keeps partition nearly unfragmented (my / is 0.5% fragmented) so it is smoother. Another think is that in near future there will be delalloc and it is nice performance improver (I have tryed that time ago).

Arch Linux

#1 2007-07-22 15:52:15

how should i partition my HD?

#2 2007-07-22 17:34:59

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#3 2007-07-22 18:10:14

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#4 2007-07-22 18:33:58

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#5 2007-07-22 20:02:33

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#6 2007-07-23 00:43:56

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#7 2007-07-23 06:21:08

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#8 2007-07-23 06:58:14

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#9 2007-07-23 13:21:39

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#10 2007-07-23 16:42:22

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#11 2007-07-23 23:58:30

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#12 2007-07-24 00:23:17

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#13 2007-07-24 02:54:17

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#14 2007-07-24 15:44:33

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#15 2007-07-24 16:09:32

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#16 2007-07-24 16:15:10

Re: how should i partition my HD?

#17 2007-07-31 18:19:29

Re: how should i partition my HD?

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