[Sussex] Partitioning Ideas/Suggestions

[John D.]

It's my Clares birthday today. So I've got her this rather nifty little
Samsung mp3 player. With 1 gig of flash storage, which supports
mp3/wma/wav/ogg (excellent = ogg :D ).

I have two problems with this. firstly, the software thats come with the
player is windows based and my windows XP install still won't see
my /mnt/fat32 (/dev/hda7) partition, but I think that I've worked out
why that is.

Because as shown in my /etc/fstab (below), the actual fat32 partition is
logical, and for reasons that I don't understand, I managed to make
the /dev/hda4 extended partition "linux extended" as opposed to
windows/dos extended, and I suspect that most of us know how fussy
windows in general (XP specifically) is, when it comes to seeing other
formats.

So, given that, I thought it might be a sensible time to change world +
dog, partition wise.

/dev/hda1		/mnt/windows	ntfs		defaults,ro		0 3
/dev/hda2		/boot		ext3		noauto,noatime		1 2
/dev/hda5		/		reiserfs	noatime			0 1
/dev/hda6		/home		reiserfs	noatime,user,exec		0 2
/dev/hda7		/mnt/fat32	vfat		user,rw,exec,uid=1000,gid=1000		0 0
/dev/hda3		none		swap		sw			0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0	/mnt/cdrom	iso9660		noauto,ro,user		0 0
#/dev/fd0		/mnt/floppy	auto		noauto			0 0

# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!
none			/proc		proc		defaults		0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). 
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
#  use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:

none			/dev/shm	tmpfs		defaults		0 0

The /etc/fstab as shown above, has /dev/hda 1, 2 and 3 as primary
partitions, with 4 extended into 5, 6 and 7.

I was wondering if it made any difference if I changed nearly the whole
scheme, so that I had /dev/hda 1 (windowsXP) as primary, then instead of
having /dev/hda2 and 3 as /boot and /swap respectively, change it so
that I have /dev/hda 2 as primary for mp3, formatted as FAT32, then just
made /dev/hda 3 as extended for /boot, /swap, /root and /home.

I don't know if theres any issues surrounding having the /boot, /swap
or /root as purely logical partitions (I doubt that /root will have a
problem as its already a logical partition).

Because that way, I'd have some room to manoeuvre at some later stage,
not having used 4 primary partitions.

Sure I follow that I'll have to re-install my gentoo (ha, I'll have to
download the latest version as the one that I've got on disc is somewhat
out of date), but that's not too much of a problem - just time.

The whole point of the exercise is so that I can rip stuff in linux,
save it to the mp3 partition, but if necessary, Clare can also just do
that and put any encodings into the same partition from windows.

It may seem like using a sledgehammer to crack a very small walnut, but
it would clear up some minor issues/niggles that I've had for a while.

Could anyone see any holes in this idea/logic, or even suggest better
ways of achieveing this ?????

Cheers.

John D.