[PLUG] Re: Partition recommendations

[Imad]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Doug Porter wrote:

> wwolfe@purdue.edu wrote:
> >
> > I know I need to put /boot at the beginning of the drive, but I
> > don't know how big to make it.
>
> If you use grub as your boot loader and have lba enabled in your
> bios for your disk you won't need a /boot, because Grub can boot
> an operating system past the 8 GB mark.  I suspect recent
> versions of lilo have this capability too.
>
> If you still want to make a /boot I used to make them about 20
> MB.  It really just depends on how many kernels you want to have
> lying around though.

IIRC, you can't use most journalized file systems (X, Reiser, etc.) for
where the kernel is stored. So if you're going to use a journalized file
system (except ext3), you should have a seperate boot partition. I'd
recommend 40-80 MB or so dedicated to that, just in case you want to use
multiple kernels someday.

Otherwise, you'll probably also want 1-2 Windows partions (perhaps an
NTFS for WinNT files and a FAT32 for doc files that's also accessable
from Linux), a Linux /home partion (to store Linux-only/mostly files), a
Linux swap partition (size depends on your physical RAM and RAM
usage... a fairly decent estimate is 2*(total RAM usage - physical
RAM)), and a primary (root "/") Linux partition (preferably a few gigs
in size).

If you're like me, you won't find that you're using as much
space for Linux files as Windoze files, so it's probably better to
allocate the lion's share of your HDD to Windoze.

BTW, Mandrake's DiskDrake is a pretty good partition program. On the
DOS/Windows side, there's the combo of Ranish's Partition Manager
(freeware) and Partition Resizer (also freeware).

Best,

--Imad "(e)magius" Hussain

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"[E]very time one truly appreciates a work of art, one is, for the
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--Rudy von Bitter Rucker, _Infinity and the Mind
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