On Tue, 23 Nov 1999, Benjamin wrote:
> Dear friends:
>
> I am still unclear about certain things having to do with creating a
> /home partition.
>
> 1) I will create a / directory of 3 gig, a swap file of 128 meg and a
> /home directory with the rest (I have a 4.3 gig drive) using DiskDruid.
>
> I will call / hda1, but what do I call my /home directory? That is, what
> is the basis for naming it hda4 or hda5, etc.? That is, what does the
> number 4 in hda4 stand for? A sector? If so, how do I decide what to
> name it?
Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, Disk Druid assigns the numbers
automatically for you when you create the partition so you shouldn't have
to worry about it.
As for what the numbers mean... they're simply the number of the partition
on that drive. hda1 is the first partition on hda, hda2 is the second,
and so on.
> 2) If I create a /home directory with the remaining disk space, won't
> root, that is, / create a /home directory automatically WITHIN its 3 gig
> partition?
Well, look at it this way... after you install you have a /mnt/floppy
directory with nothing in it, right? If you were to copy a file to that
directory, then it would be on your root partition. However, if you were
to put a floppy disk in your drive, and mount that disk under /mnt/floppy,
then when you copy something to to /mnt/floppy it goes onto the disk
instead of the root partition.
Hard drive partitions work the same way. Hypothetically, let's say you
create a partition called /home and Disk Druid assigns it the number hda4.
What you are doing is creating partition hda4, and telling Disk Druid to
put a line in your fstab (take a look at /etc/fstab to see what I mean) to
automatically mount hda4 under the /home directory.
So, either way scripts will automatically create a /home directory and
create user directories inside that. If there is nothing mounted under
/home, then anything created in there is on the root partition, just like
if you copied something to /mnt/floppy with no disk mounted; if there IS a
partition mounted there (hda4 for this example) then anything created in
/home will be on that hda4 partition instead of root.
> 3) Is there a way to indicate a relative value for /home? That is, after
> creating hda1 (3 gig) and a 128 meg swap file, is there a way for me to
> indicate that I want the remaining space allocated to /home, that is
> without indicating a SPECIFIC value, just to say: /home (hda4 or hda5)
> will have the REMAINING space on hard drive hda, just as you do when
> select 1 and grow and then your entire HD is automatically assigned to
> your basic / directory?
Unless I'm not remembering right, yes, you can check that 'grow to fill
disk' (or whatever it's called) box for your /home partition, or any
partition. So just make root, swap, and then use that option when you
create /home.
-Tom
