On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 17:45, BJ Tracy wrote: > Hello All, > > Well I finally had to reboot my system because of something I did in the > console and it froze up. On the reboot I was watching the screen and there > was a bunch of hd errors so I went into Mandrake Mount Points and here is > what I found. > > My desktop has three hard drives and I can see all three in Mount Points. > When I loaded MDK 10.0 on my desktop I installed it on my new hard drive and > have been up and running great. > > Here is what I have then I will ask for advice / help. > My new hard drive has / swap and /home on it. > the other two are just journalized ext 3 but not mounted ( I guess is the > term). > > My question is: If I go into Mount Points and go to each hard drive and > choose the partition size and define it what should they be ? > /var another /home ..... just what I'm not sure. I have all this space and > it's not showing up usable.
Partitioning is one thing you must do yourself as far as I am concerned because everybody has different space requirements. One place you can start is by analyzing the space requirements of 9.2 MDK itself. On my system I have a pretty hefty installation, as far as number of total mdk packages installed. The RULE is for the /usr partition is to be at 40% or less usage AFTER you finish a brand new MDK install. Why? Because as your installation grows you want plenty of room for the upgrade/bugfix packages and more brand new packages. Through trial and error over the years I have found that 40% usage at installation time on the /usr partition pretty much covers all bases until the next upgrade. What is that size, you ask? Well I have a pretty loaded install and for me that means the /usr partition is 4.6 gigs total. The only other partitions you have to worry about as far as size goes are /var and /home. I don't do separate /var and /home partitions because the file lifetimes on those partitions are very similar (and I don't put a large number of separate hard drives in my box). One main criterion for separation of partitions is file lifetimes; the more files change, the higher the probability of filesystem failure or corruption. Therefore file groups with high rates of change are historically grouped on their own partitions, such as /tmp. For that reason I symlink /home to /var/home, and during partitioning the lion's share of the drive space is always allocated to /var. (var also has a habit of being extremely variable in size, which is another important reason to give it the lions share of the space along with /var/home. That way your logs will never cause the system to outstrip it's available space on /var. Another advantage of doing a /home-/var/home symlink setup.) The current 9.2 MDK partition size requirements as I have determined them are as follows: root = not more than 540 megs boot = exactly 43 megs(JFS and XFS filesystems require at least this much, which is overkill) tmp = not more than 1.2 gig (depending on if you use it for downloading or not. If you download stuff to other spots, 1.2G is more than enough) usr = not more than 4.6 gigs as long as your default install is at or below 40% usage of /usr. In other words at 40% usage my /usr is 1.7 gigs of program/other data. Your usage at the end of making your installation choices may be more; the only way to know is to install and look. I myself always do manual selections (on EVERYTHING) with no group selections except for "kde workstation" and "documentation"; and then use the floppy save feature of the package install step to save what I have selected. Then on the next install I just deselect all group selections, select individual selections, and then load the floppy save from the previous installation. This is a real fast way to pick your packages, but it does require that you go through a total individual selection install at least once. It also requires that you know what you like and use and what you don't like and don't use. Floppy-style package selection during installation just plain takes pre-preparation. That in turn requires a little time and experience with the distro, and ALOT of reading of the package descriptions at installation time. > > Also do I need a swap on all three drives? Short answer: NO, you technically do not need swap on all three drives. HOWEVER...*supposedly* if the kernel sees that you have multiple swap on several drives, then (according to the docs) it will "stripe" it's swap across those three drives. This means a three-fold swap performance increase, because you now have three drives doing the work of one. I personally don't depend on the kernel doing swap; I've got two identical drives raided together into raid-0 partitions, and I've soft-raided the swap partition myself at raid-0. That way I know for a fact that the swap is raided. The other way I can't "see" what the kernel is doing with swap for sure, but if I do swap with soft raid then I know exactly what is going on. > I have gone thru all my books and the net and nothing really talks about > multiple hard drives. On multiple hard drives; I see this is a reason people have /music or /store or /dump partitions IF they do NOT have two identical hard drives that can be raided together for a 100% performance increase. On the other hand, if I DID have two older non-identical drives along with a new drive, I would probably still attempt to raid the older drives together into one large partition so that I could have A. A larger partitionable space that I have control over B. A 100% increase in performance With the one new "perfect" drive, and other older used drives, I would use the new for for root, boot, swap, tmp, and var/home, and then possibly raid the older ones together and do a /music or /store or /dump or /whatever. If I had two new identicals (like I do now) I would stripe raid all partitions together. This is not as hard as it sounds; the partitions on two identical new drives are all identical in size, and follow the space usage conventions outlined above. Here is an example of what you would end up having on the new "perfect" drive: Disk /dev/sda: 36.7 GB, 36703918080 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4462 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 4462 35840983+ 85 Linux extended /dev/sda5 1 6 48132 83 Linux /dev/sda6 7 93 698796 83 Linux /dev/sda7 94 160 538146 82 Linux swap /dev/sda8 161 307 1180746 83 Linux /dev/sda9 308 902 4779306 83 Linux /dev/sda10 903 4462 28595668+ 83 Linux sda5 = boot sda6 = root sda7 = swap sda8 = tmp sda9 = /usr sda10 = /var (and /var/home symlinked to /home) The layout of partitions usually requires that you pre-calculate what you know you will need spacewise (as I have already done) and then divide those numbers by two to get your raid partition sizes. The example above is a single drive example and not meant to show you how a new single drive should be laid out and not how two identical raid-0 drives would be laid out. The final space numbers above would still be useful in calculating raid partition sizes on two drives tho. Now you are probably asking, what's the limit in striping drives? Can I do 3 drives for a 200% performance increase? Can I do 4 drives for a 300% increase? The answer is yes you can, but your possibility of failure also increases. If you lose one drive you lose the entire array. Therefore a two drive array has twice the possibility of failure over a one drive array, three drive stripe has three times the likelyhood of failure, et cetera. That's why I always use brand new drives for raiding and I only use two. This increases the performance by 100% but keeps the possibility of failure to a factor of two. I also try to keep backups more often. > > I'm really confused now on what to do. > Thanks for all your help in advance, > bj > > > ______________________________________________________________________ LX
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