Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

Willie Green · 2009-06-12 21:02:43

Hi folks!
I've been using a few different linux distros for about a year-and-a-half now, and feel that I'm ready to try Archlinux.

I have a Compaq Deskpro PIII-800 w/ 256 MB RAM (expandable to 512), CDRW & 15 Gb HD.
If I yank the floppy drive, I can stick in a "spare" 10 GB HD that I have. But I'm uncertain whether I want to put it on the Primary IDE cable with the 15 Gb HD or on the Secondary IDE with the CDRW.

Furthermore, I'm uncertain as to the partitioning scheme and which mount points to put on which drive.
(naturally, whatever works easiest with the Archlinux installer would be preferrable.)

There are really no "special" considerations for this PC. It's primary function is a simple, single-user home-use desktop: Web browsing, email, listening to MP3s, watching YouTubes and such. I'm not heavy into gaming or programming or anything like that.

I anticpate dedicating the entire 25 Gb to Archlinux since I've never operated dual-boot with different distros. But if somebody wants to suggest a simple way to reserve space so maybe I can dual boot in the future, that's an option I can consider too.

I'm not entirely stumped as to how to do this, but any suggestions from more experienced users would be much appreciated. Thanks!!!

fukawi2 · 2009-06-12 23:21:46

Wow, reading the first 4 lines of that post sent me back to 1999

If you want a challenge and good learning experience, install on LVM or RAID-0 which will make the separation between the drives invisible and treat them as one big drive. It might also make performance a *little* bit faster.

Otherwise, I'd install your system on the 10gb, and make one big partition on the 15gb for your /home

Last edited by fukawi2 (2009-06-12 23:22:01)

lseubert · 2009-06-12 23:27:13

Willie Green wrote:

I have a Compaq Deskpro PIII-800 w/ 256 MB RAM (expandable to 512),

First off, although this is an old PC and I rarely recommend sinking upgrade money into such an old machine, if you plan to use this machine for a while, blow the money to take it up to 512MB RAM. Such an amount of money isn't too much to pay for the few years you will get back out of it (hopefully), and there will be a definite performance boost.

I recommend a lightweight desktop, such as XFCE. Or consider LXDE, even lighter than XFCE, but still a wee bit flaky and lacking in polish. Another possibility is to go with a tiling window manager, such as Awesome, Xmonad, poison, or evilwm. Check out the Arch Wiki and the Forums for more info. Any of these GUI's will give you acceptable performance on such a machine. And keeping these old PCs running is such fun

CDRW & 15 Gb HD. If I yank the floppy drive, I can stick in a "spare" 10 GB HD that I have. But I'm uncertain whether I want to put it on the Primary IDE cable with the 15 Gb HD or on the Secondary IDE with the CDRW.

Here is what you should consider doing:

1 - Remove the floppy drive, use CD-R's and USB sticks instead.
2 - Set up the 10 GB drive as the IDE Primary-Master device
3 - Set up the 15 GB drive as the IDE Primary-Slave device
4 - Set up the CDRW drive as the IDE Secondary-Master device

Rationale for this configuration:

Floppy drives suck - they are slow and small. (Huh, huh. I said small, floppy, and suck. Huh, huh.) Also, the manufacturers of floppy disks these days make crap products that are notoriously unreliable and error prone. CD-R and USB stick are far, far superior in every way.

The 10 GB drive will be your /boot and / drive. Your BIOS might appreciate having the MBR and /boot partitions on the Primary-Master with such an old machine.

The 15 GB drive will be your /home drive. Place it on the same cable as the 10 GB drive, but set as Primary-Slave. This keeps future maintenance simple. If you ever have to pull your optical drive, its cable is routed to just one device.

The CDRW must be set as Master. Optical drives do better when set as Master. Since the Primary channel is taken up by the two hard drives, set the optical drive to Secondary-Master. Don't forget to check your BIOS settings to make the CDRW first in the boot sequence, followed by the 10 GB Primary-Master drive.

The real benefit of putting your / and /home partitions on two separate drives is speed in day to day use. When you open a program, the drive head accesses the program binary in the /usr section of the drive, and usually it then moves way over and accesses some data and config files from the /home section of the drive platter. If you put /usr and /home on different drives, there is no long delay as the drive head does that long seek. The program will load off of the Primary-Master drive while the data and config files quickly thereafter load from the Primary-Slave drive. Programs will open up much more quickly - about as well as you can expect for such an old machine.

Furthermore, I'm uncertain as to the partitioning scheme and which mount points to put on which drive. I anticpate dedicating the entire 25 Gb to Archlinux since I've never operated dual-boot with different distros. But if somebody wants to suggest a simple way to reserve space so maybe I can dual boot in the future, that's an option I can consider too.

On the Primary-Master, set up a 50 MB /boot partition using ext3, along with around 512MB of swap space. Then, if you have any experience with LVM, or want to read up on it; dedicate the rest of the space on the Primary-Master to a Logical Volume, configured as / using ext4. Later, if you ever want to set up another partition for a different distro, you can handle such matters easily through LVM, which is very good at shrinking, growing, creating, and removing Logical Volumes.

The alternative is to skip the LVM business, do the same /boot and swap scheme as mentioned in the previous paragraph, and set aside 5.5 GB to 6.0 GB as a / partition - as much as possible, using ext4. Leave the rest of the Primary-Master drive blank, so that you can someday create another partition for some other distro. (But dude, really, I have been running Linux for almost ten years, and I have tried out many dozens of distros. Once you go Arch, you never go back. That's it )

That said, with such small drives, you don't really have much space for dual-boot setups. Arch Linux can suck up a lot of space in /var if you don't pacman -Scc frequently. If this was my system, I would forego dreams of future dual-booting, and go with something simple like this:

/boot 50 MB ext3
swap 512 - 1024 MB
/ rest of drive ext4

Regardless of what partition scheme you choose for the Primary-Master, be sure to dedicate the entire 15GB Primary-Slave drive as your /home partition using ext4. The default config for ext4 is fast and reliable, more so than ext3 - it is a great choice in filesystems these days. (That said - in a few weeks I might be switching my system over to NILFS2 - come on 2.6.30 kernel! Git on down to core!)

Finally, Willie, while it is fun to keep old gear running, sometimes it doesn't work out. Your PC probably has an old power supply, and the electronic compoments on the motherboard are likely worn out and fragile. (Yes, electronic components do get old and wear out - mostly due to thermal cycling stress.) Maybe right now, your PC has achieved a sort of happy homeostasis, just as it is. But adding more RAM and a second drive could upset this delicate balance, and you might find that after a few months of operation, the system craps out and dies. This happened to a friend of mine with his seven year old PC that I helped him build. After he added some RAM and a PCI card, it croaked within a month. When you swap around your components in this PC, making sure to give it a good cleaning - clear out all the dust, and add a new case fan or two to help with the cooling. And then, hope for the best and enjoy working with your "new" machine

Willie Green · 2009-06-12 23:47:08

fukawi2 wrote:

Wow, reading the first 4 lines of that post sent me back to 1999
If you want a challenge and good learning experience, install on LVM or RAID-0 which will make the separation between the drives invisible and treat them as one big drive. It might also make performance a *little* bit faster.
Otherwise, I'd install your system on the 10gb, and make one big partition on the 15gb for your /home

Thank-you, fukawi2
Yes, a challenge and good learning experience is precisely why I'm installing Archlinux.
I have a modest computer by today's standards, and my actual needs are modest.
But I realize to get the most out of this hardware, I'm going to have to go "lean and mean" to sqeeze out the best performance I can.

II see there's a Wiki on "Installing with Software RAID or LVM", so I'll dive into that and see what I can decipher. I'm pretty good at following step-by-step instructions, and the documentation here at Archlinux looks superb! I just like having all the details planned in advance before tackling such a major change. In the long run, it saves a lot of aggravation that way.

fukawi2 · 2009-06-13 00:02:10

Willie Green wrote:

Yes, a challenge and good learning experience is precisely why I'm installing Archlinux.

Glad to hear it

Willie Green wrote:

I have a modest computer by today's standards, and my actual needs are modest.
But I realize to get the most out of this hardware, I'm going to have to go "lean and mean" to sqeeze out the best performance I can.

It's always fun working with some older hardware to see just what you can do with it. Up until 12 months ago or so, I was running a development server on a P-III 333 with 128mb RAM and a single 10gb HDD

Willie Green wrote:

II see there's a Wiki on "Installing with Software RAID or LVM", so I'll dive into that and see what I can decipher. I'm pretty good at following step-by-step instructions, and the documentation here at Archlinux looks superb! I just like having all the details planned in advance before tackling such a major change. In the long run, it saves a lot of aggravation that way.

That is a pretty good article, I followed it my first time. Reading through it first is a good idea, but even if you do stuff it up, wipe the computer and start again. You'll find things make more sense each time you do it so even if it takes you 5 tries, you'll understand it pretty well

lseubert · 2009-06-13 00:20:19

Willie Green wrote:

II see there's a Wiki on "Installing with Software RAID or LVM", so I'll dive into that and see what I can decipher. I'm pretty good at following step-by-step instructions, and the documentation here at Archlinux looks superb! I just like having all the details planned in advance before tackling such a major change. In the long run, it saves a lot of aggravation that way.

Be careful with RAID 0 though. Yes, it is a bit faster, just like fukawi2 said. However, RAID 0 basically splits your data into two parts, and stripes it across the two drives. Half your data (programs, /etc, /home files - everything) is on one drive, while the other half is on the other drive. If one of those drives should fail, a likely possibility with such old hardware, then you will lose ALL the data. You won't be able to recover even half the data from the remaining good hard drive - it will ALL be gone. So, if you go with RAID 0, make sure you backup your /etc and /home partitions very frequently, as well as your pacman database files. That way, should a drive go down, which in my pessimistic but realistic experience it will, you'll be able to get a new drive and rebuild your system with minimal data loss.

Rather than RAID 0, go with that other setup that both fukawi2 and I mentioned - /boot, swap, and / on the 10 GB Primary-Master drive, with /home on the separate 15 GB Primary-Slave drive. That too will give you a nice speed boost in a practical way. Not quite as much as RAID 0, but a very noticeable improvment. And, more importantly, you're data will be somewhat safer. Although, that said, you should be performing frequent backups no matter what sort of system you have. On the CLI, rsync is your friend, and via GUI, Grsync is your best bud.

You are wise to work out a good partitioning plan ahead of time. Partitioning isn't hard once you really understand it, but it is tricky and fraught with peril. You can destroy a lot of data if you don't do it right. But if done correctly, a good partioning scheme makes system maintenance and upgrades much easier. Above all, be sure to have separate / and /home partitions.

The Arch Beginners Guide has excellent advice on partitioning. Also, here is note from the Securing Debian Manual on partitioning and security concerns. This is just an FYI though. For your system, a simple /boot, /, swap, and /home partitioning scheme will work just fine. This is what I use on my home PC, though if I had more space, I would have dedicated /tmp, /usr, /opt, /var, and /srv partitions.

Willie Green · 2009-06-13 00:51:26

lseubert wrote:

Willie Green wrote:
I have a Compaq Deskpro PIII-800 w/ 256 MB RAM (expandable to 512),
First off, although this is an old PC and I rarely recommend sinking upgrade money into such an old machine, if you plan to use this machine for a while, blow the money to take it up to 512MB RAM. Such an amount of money isn't too much to pay for the few years you will get back out of it (hopefully), and there will be a definite performance boost.

Thanks for the great advice, Iseubert!
Tinkering with older hardware like this has become somewhat of a passionate hobby for me. I'm a 57-year-old engineer who no longer has a craving to keep up with the latest and greatest technology. I've spent way too much money trying to do that over the years. So now I satisfy my geek tendencies with the challenge of doing things as dirt cheap as i can.

I picked up this Compaq Piii-800 for only $40, but it appears in great shape.
My younger brother is talking about upgrading his RAM in his P4 system, so I'll probably "inherit" the 256Mb PC133 SDRAM that I need when he replaces it with a larger chip.

Video is a bit of a bottleneck. I installed an Nvidia TNT2 card with 16 Mb RAM that I had lying around. It works better than the motherboard video that was built-in, but that's not saying much. I've seen better cards available (used) for $25, but the bargain-hunter in me says to keep looking until I find something for only $10 or $15.

As far as software goes... I've already become a Fluxbox addict. I don't need or want those pesky icons cluttering my desktop. They just consume more resources anyway and I'm putting my system on a lightweight diet.

But I've been reading the Arch wiki on lightweight software and am intrigued by packages like Qingy instead of GDM or SLiM, and Midori or Netsurf instead of Firefox or Opera. Heck, I'm even open to going more lightweight than Fluxbox if I find something I like.

But all that's part of the learning experience that I'm looking forward to here. There's plenty of time for that. Right now, I gotta set-up my hardware for the base system.

But THANKS for the advice! It's exactly what I was hoping for!!!

lseubert · 2009-06-13 11:40:45

Willie Green wrote:

Video is a bit of a bottleneck. I installed an Nvidia TNT2 card with 16 Mb RAM that I had lying around. It works better than the motherboard video that was built-in, but that's not saying much. I've seen better cards available (used) for $25, but the bargain-hunter in me says to keep looking until I find something for only $10 or $15.

Just about any video card will be an improvement on the chipset based video on such a machine. Good choice. Plus, lightweight Linux GUIs don't require much GPU power.

As far as software goes... I've already become a Fluxbox addict. I don't need or want those pesky icons cluttering my desktop. They just consume more resources anyway and I'm putting my system on a lightweight diet.

Ah, OK - you already walk on the light side.

Since you like Fluxbox, consider tinkering with LXDE someday. It uses OpenBox, so you'll mostly feel at home, but it integrates some other components to create a very lightweight "desktop environment". Among other things, LXDE installs the amazing and very fast file manager, pcmanfm. I left LXDE and returned to XFCE, but I kept pcmanfm.

And if you want to go even more lightweight than Fluxbox or LXDE, take a look at a tiling window manager. Tiling window managers are very lightweight and fast, and mostly controlled from the keyboard. If you invest some time in learning them, they become very efficient. They are like the CLI versus a GUI. The CLI is hard to learn but easy to use, while GUIs are easy to learn, but hard to use. TWMs are hard to learn, but easy to use - very efficient. That should appeal to your engineering inner geek :-)

Tiling window managers are well supported in the Arch community - there are lots of TWM afficionados around here, and they post extensively to the webforums and the wiki. Here are some of the TWMs you might consider:

musca, awesome, xmonad, ion3, evilwm (presently used by our dread Arch Overlord, Phrakture, who used to run ratpoison), dwm, dwn-gtx, echinus, i3, scrotwm, subtle, wmii, ratpoison, and stumpwm

But I've been reading the Arch wiki on lightweight software and am intrigued by packages like Qingy instead of GDM or SLiM, and Midori or Netsurf instead of Firefox or Opera. Heck, I'm even open to going more lightweight than Fluxbox if I find something I like.

If Qingy intrigues you, take a look at this page for some interesting avenues to explore.

I too am ditching Opera and Firefox for something better. I have concluded that Webkit is the future. I am experimenting with the various Webkit based browsers available with Arch. Epiphany-webkit, Rekonq, Midori, and Arora are now under testing. I'll take a hard look at Firefox 3.5 when it comes out, but if the promised speed boost isn't there, I'm saying goodbye to Gecko based browsers.

I downloaded NetSurf, which I hadn't heard of before. A quick test shows some pretty good speed, but it doesn't seem to import bookmarks. Am I right about that?

But THANKS for the advice! It's exactly what I was hoping for!!!

Happy to help out. I have done lots of Linux installs on old hardware like that, and helped friends with similar machines over the years. I am used to figuring out decent partitioning schemes within the limits of old hardware. Laying out efficient partition schemes on a one terabyte hard drive just isn't a challenge

If you really want to play with some great old hardware, pick up a used DEC Alpha workstation and run one of these distros on it. Debian and NetBSD are your best choices. Alphas were the most innovative, powerful, fast, and efficient CPUs back in the day. Nothing else came close - by far the best technology. But DEC and Compaq had no clue about marketing, and they weren't nearly as ruthless as some players in the IT industry. <cough> Intel <cough>, <cough> Microsoft <cough>. And so, because DEC wasn't slick and ruthless, the mighty Alpha died, despite superior technology. You're an engineer, you know the story well.

Willie Green · 2009-06-13 15:16:03

lseubert wrote:

And so, because DEC wasn't slick and ruthless, the mighty Alpha died, despite superior technology. You're an engineer, you know the story well.

Yeah... I'm "old school"
Got my degree in the year 1 BC (before calculators)
Never had to wear a crewcut, white short-sleeved shirt and bow-tie to work, so I'm not THAT elderly,
But I did learn the hard way, using a slide rule, T-square, pencil/paper, log/trig tables, etc.
Even learned some Fortran, Cobal and IBM 360 assembly programming using a deck of punchcards.

But I am NOT a "computer professional".
My background is industrial/manufacturing engineering....
Basicly a "jack-of-all-trades, master of none"
No matter what kind of machinery we're talking about (computers, cars, lawmowers, HVAC systems or production equipement like conveyors, lathes, punch presses, etc.), it's become part of my genetic code to roll up my sleeves, dig out the manuals, and figure out what makes them tick so I can figure out how to repair/replace/upgrade or otherwise make them more efficient/reliable and cost effective.
And in a factory environment, I'm the guy that the IT guys work with to implement things like barcoding, shop-floor data collection, labor reporting, statistical process control, inventory managment, industrial automation, office automation etc. etc. Virtually anything and everything under roof.
And in the absence of IT guys in some smaller, less affluent companies, it often simply falls in my lap to "make it work" as best I can on my own.

I know how to work within tight budgets and constrained resources.
I know how to bleed a machine to it's last productive penny.
I get weary of fighting office politicians and beancounters who won't sign-off on a 50-cent lugnut even if it would prevent the whole factory from going belly-up.

But enough of the war stories.
My old PC is my mental therapy where I can relax, take my time, and fulfill my natural propensities to keep it simple, lean, mean and efficient.
"Work Smarter, Not Harder"
Been doing that my whole life.

But I'm still just a linux noob. And I'm inexperienced at the terminal prompt. And I don't know bash scripts like I should. And I'll never learn any of that if I just stick with the distros that offer an easy-to-use, fully integrated, problem-free GUI desktop right out of the box.
But back in the "good old days" (before Win 3.0) I could work miracles with a DOS prompt with the best of them (well, maybe not the "best", but I was darn good for not being a professional computer guru), so I shouldn't have any difficulty learning what I want/need to learn.
The only REAL problem is that I have to admit that I'm getting old, and can't absorb the tech info as fast as I used to.

And if you want to go even more lightweight than Fluxbox or LXDE, take a look at a tiling window manager. Tiling window managers are very lightweight and fast, and mostly controlled from the keyboard. If you invest some time in learning them, they become very efficient.

Yeah, I spotted those in the Wiki.
I'll certainly be trying to experiment with them sometime in the future.
But for initial installation, I'm probably going to stick with Fluxbox.
If I try to start with too many unfamiliar packages all at once, I'll only be dooming myself to failure.

I downloaded NetSurf, which I hadn't heard of before. A quick test shows some pretty good speed, but it doesn't seem to import bookmarks. Am I right about that?

I've only played around with NetSurf a little bit when the developers of TinyMe were evaluating different lightweight browsers for their distro. I forget the details, but at that time, it looked promising but wasn't ready for primetime. Since then, I've noticed NetSurf has released a newer version, so I'm interested in seeing what they improved. It's on my "watch list"

I'm currently using Linux Mint Fluxbox "Felicia".
It's a great little distro that works well on my machine, but is simply still too "heavy" for my personal interests.
I have Midori installed from their repository. It seems to work very well, even with Flash. But it's only version 0.0.18 and some features appear disabled. And it's prone to unexpectedly crash. So I'm hoping newer versions available in Archlinux will rectify that.

Once again, I'd like to thank-you for your thorough and thoughtful suggestions.
They have been very helpful and bolster my confidence of making the right decision.
I think that the "Arch Way" is very suitable to my personal preferences, and that I'll be very happy here.
But it's getting nigh time that I stop talking about it and roll up my sleeves and get ready to actually do it.
You've been a great help! Wish me luck!

lseubert · 2009-06-13 20:28:46

Willie Green wrote:

I'm currently using Linux Mint Fluxbox "Felicia".
It's a great little distro that works well on my machine, but is simply still too "heavy" for my personal interests.

Yes, Linux Mint is an excellent distro - the best of its kind. It is what Ubuntu should be - bug free and fast and GUI simple. I recommend it to all my friends who wouldn't be interested in something like Arch.

Once again, I'd like to thank-you for your thorough and thoughtful suggestions.
They have been very helpful and bolster my confidence of making the right decision.
I think that the "Arch Way" is very suitable to my personal preferences, and that I'll be very happy here.

Good luck with your experiments with Arch. Be sure to come back and participate in the community in any way you can. In addition to the technical excellence of Arch itself, I think its community is also exceptionally good.

And someday, if you really want to dig into the nitty-gritty of a Linux system, take a look at Linux From Scratch, and after that, give DIY Linux a try.

Willie Green · 2009-06-14 23:38:01

lseubert wrote:

And someday, if you really want to dig into the nitty-gritty of a Linux system, take a look at Linux From Scratch, and after that, give DIY Linux a try.

LOL! Well maybe someday.... if I'm fortunate to live that long.
I had the audacity to try Gentoo last fall, even though I knew it was way beyond my capabilities.
Believe it or not, I actually managed to get something that vaguely resembled a Fluxbox desktop by following their instructions.
But I fell flat on my face when it came time to install any major apps.
I'm certain that I had my dependencies and USE flags all borked.
C'est la vie... I'm sure I must've learned something from the experience, I just don't know precisely what, except that I still have a long way to go.

But Arch looks a lot friendlier than that, so I'm looking forward to working at the command prompt and learning the basics before trying to compile anything again. Maybe the Arch Build System will help ease me into that kind of stuff, but I really need to strengthen my basic skills first. (Or maybe it's the AUR where I'll learn something about that... I only skimmed those parts. They look interesting, but it's premature for me to study it in detail.)

Last edited by Willie Green (2009-06-14 23:50:55)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-06-12 21:02:43

Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#2 2009-06-12 23:21:46

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#3 2009-06-12 23:27:13

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#4 2009-06-12 23:47:08

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#5 2009-06-13 00:02:10

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#6 2009-06-13 00:20:19

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#7 2009-06-13 00:51:26

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#8 2009-06-13 11:40:45

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#9 2009-06-13 15:16:03

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#10 2009-06-13 20:28:46

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

#11 2009-06-14 23:38:01

Re: Partitioning suggestions for dual hard drive installation?

Board footer