[sclug] RE: Newbie, partitioning 120Gb HDD - recommendations?

[Matt]

On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 22:36, John Stumbles wrote:
> Alan Pope wrote:
> > 
> > I just installed on a 200GB disk, and just created one big / and some
> > swap, thats all. Some people would have you create a /, /usr, /home,
> > /var etc but I dont bother.
> 
> I think the argument for not putting _everything_ under / is that 
> if/when you want to install another OS/verion/whatever you can put that 
> on another smallish partition leaving all your non-OS-related /home 
> stuff untouched.

If you split your disk up you have less chance of one of those
partitions filling up causing problems elsewhere on the system. A single
/ partition full up can cause some interesting behaviour.

Also, you might increase your chances of recovering important files if
you suffer some localised filesystem or hard disk failure.

Getting those partition sizes right first time comes with practice and a
bit of trial and error. LVM is quite useful in this regard if your
$DISTRO supports it at install-time, as you can resize without having to
keep repartitioning the disk.

Matt