Lazarus Long <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | On Tuesday, June 01, 1999 at 14:46:01 -0500, Jens B. Jorgensen wrote: | > Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | > X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; I) | > X-UIDL: e4da9602a16b12e6fe1dfa928c15b9e8 | > | > The best reason I can ever come up with for creating separate | > partitions is to | > allocate space which can't be spared: eg. create a separate /home | > so users with | > accounts on the system can't screw up the system by filling up | > the disk or so that | > runaway log files can't fill up / and screw things up. | | IMO, the best reason to make partitions is so the KERNEL will be | guaranteed to be located below cylinder 1024 for /sbin/lilo. Otherwise, | later kernel installations will run the risk of making your system | unbootable from those kernels (or at all even.)
I can think of a couple of other minor reasons: 1) fsck time. This can be annoyingly large for large partitions and even if you never foresee your system coming down improperly, e.g., without a proper shutdown, ext2 requires periodic fsck (I think the default is every 20 mounts) 2) Backups. Although I generally just back up my home machine all at once, e.g., tar cvf /dev/nst0 /, it is often convienent to back up a single partition at a time, e.g. tar --create --file=/dev/nst0 --one-file-system / tar --create --file=/dev/nst0 --one-file-system /usr etc. This makes it faster to do incremental backups for a particular partition. It also allows you to more easily have some redundancy in your backup scheme. Of course neither of these are overwhelmingly compelling... Gary