Hello all, I've been dabbling in linux on and off for a wee while now. I downloaded and installed Ubuntu on my older desktop system. I like it and would like to explore using open source software more on my main system. I was wondering how you guys partition your hard drives. What do you consider the best set-up? I'm going to dual boot win 7 and Ubuntu or mint. Cheers
For common usage (non-server or others specific task) : / /home swap (Depend of your RAM, but no too big) Currently I'm using EXT4, but EXT3 it's fine. Size are up to you, but give / 4Gb at least if you go for a full system install (I.e.: Non small footprint distros) and I will put a little more there (because most programs and games are installed there unless you make changes to install them in /home). You could avoid swap if you have a lot of RAM and don't use suspend/hibernate. Advantages: You can format / without lossing /home. The same if / got corrupts, etc... Disadvantages: With other OS maybe you need to make more extended partitions, as logical ones will be all used.
50gig windows OS's 50gig non-windows OS's Rest as a shared partition (about 360gig in my case) Having the separate shared partition for storing most of my data makes installing OS's much easier for me. Which is good as I tend to break Ubuntu quite often.
SSD: windows 7 WD Raptor: windows 7 files such as User\ and ProgramData\ WD Black: games for 700GB, temp for 250GB (eg, shifting files) WD Green: file storage, looking to move this to a NAS. best setup is to have a SSD for your main OS, and a fast HDD for those small files that gets changed a lot, such as those files inside User\ ProgramData\ and Windows\Temp\, thus prolonging the SSD's life. for dual-booting, i think it's best to ignore the boot-loader and use your motherboard's HDD boot selector to choose where to boot from. this is because if you are using Ubuntu boot-loader, and then decides to re-install Windows, it will overwrite Ubuntu boot-loader, creating a lot of hassle.
Gentoo Server, doing NAS, proxy,... AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+, 4GB RAM, 160GB OS HD, 3*1TB Data storage Code: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 92M 25M 63M 29% /boot /dev/sda2 8GB SWAP /dev/sda3 9.4G 288M 8.7G 4% / Mdadm RAID5 Array (3*1TB): /dev/md0 1.9T 679G 1.2T 37% /home LVM on /dev/sda4: /dev/mapper/neptune-tmp 1.0G 33M 992M 4% /tmp /dev/mapper/neptune-var 15G 2.2G 13G 15% /var /dev/mapper/neptune-usr 9.9G 3.5G 6.0G 37% /usr /dev/mapper/neptune-squid 11G 8.4G 2.7G 76% /var/cache/squid /dev/mapper/neptune-portage 1.0G 352M 673M 35% /usr/portage /dev/mapper/neptune-distfiles 10G 887M 9.2G 9% /usr/portage/distfiles I also have a ramdisk mounted, to speed up compiling (Gentoo ;)) portage 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /var/tmp/portage
SSD: / WD Green: /home No swap. I run the sameish setup on my laptop with a 4GB (/) and 16GB (/home) SSD and I will get round to doing it on my server with an identical WD Green for /home and either a fast 2.5" HDD or an SSD for /. Currently / is on the Green drive and it is sloooooooowwwwww. I quite like the idea of having /temp etc on a fast HDD though, although surely that sort of negates the benefit of having an SSD in the first place?
GNU/Linux. Free software. Even though Ubuntu will, if I remember correctly, automatically suggest a "small handful" of proprietary or open source programs from time to time, depending if they're "needed" for your hardware. Aside from my schoolgirl-like rant: what Kumo said. Except that I put swap in the middle, because I once read it's (barely) "better"; and I think it makes the partition table look cute. With an OS like Ubuntu (which comes with a big-ish desktop environment and, if I may so, seems bloated) you definitely want a decent-sized root partition. Running out of space on / is not good. Like someone else said, you can install applications to other partitions, but I'd rather do a re-install than that. It's unhygienic. Eventually, you'll get a really good 'feel' for your preferred partition sizes, once you are aware of all the applications you need/want, and how much extra room you need for the future applications you're going to want
Simple answer - dont! Once you partitian it its extremely hard (if not impossible) to restore. Plus it causes all sorts of problems. You're best off buying either another hard drive or an external one, they're quite cheap these days. Either that, or just allocate a set of space to gaming, art, whatever.
/ /boot /mnt/raid i tend to leave most of the system all on one big partition, so that folders can grow as they need to. the only benefit i can see to partitioning is that you can reformat without losing data, but with a proper backup plan that isn't necessary. also, i don't do swap. ram is cheaper than SSDs. glider, what's the reasoning behind the lvm on sda4?
how do you tell windows to put the files such as User and program data not on the main OS partition. I'v etried to do it many times now and have not yet found a way.
