RE: why make partitions?
On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Person, Roderick wrote: I used to wonder the samething. When I started using Linux, I always wonder why partition a disk to use the same OS on all the partitions. Then I made a big boo boo and hosed system and re-installed all 500MB of downloads again, that took over a week to get!! So, I decided to try the partition and I even dedicated partition to only hold .debs and .tars and all downloaded stuff From: Jens B. Jorgensen [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. Remco van 't Veer wrote: Is the any technical reason why I should fdisk an extra IDE hdd and not mkfs the whole thing at ones? Apart from: hdb: unknown partition table at boot time everything works perfectly.. As well as the other reasons, you can't predict what you are going to want to do with the disk. Many people have had to re-partition their disks because they lacked to elementary foresight to create multiple partitions in the first place; and even if you plan to use fips or some other supposedly non-destructive means, you aren't going to do that until you have gone out and bought a tape drive, installed it, and backed up the disk. Well, you aren't unless you are prepared to lose everything on the disk, or unless you are a little naive or reckless. The every first law of computers is Murphy's, if anything can go wrong it will. Multiple partitions are a little inconvenient when you have filled one and another is empty, but you can even things up with symlinks, e.g. move /usr/lib to a half-empty partition, and plant a symbolic link to it in /usr, before upgrading from lib5 to lib6. It doesn't do much harm to keep some of your spare disk space in some spare partitions. Then you have more freedom to do things you haven't thought of yet, or just now are sure you will never want to do, e.g. increasing the size of your swap space. The average size of new hard disks has been growing a lot faster than the bloat of operating systems. The question you should probably be asking is, when I have this huge blank space, do I have any sufficiently good reason to not divide it into ten partitions before doing anything else? In other words, you don't need a reason to carve it up, you need a reason not to.
Re: why make partitions?
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. Remco van 't Veer wrote: Hi, Is the any technical reason why I should fdisk an extra IDE hdd and not mkfs the whole thing at ones? Apart from: hdb: unknown partition table at boot time everything works perfectly.. Any thoughts? Regards, Remco -- Kosto World Trade Center anthrax plutonium SEAL Team 6 Nazi nuclear BATF Ft. Meade Uzi FNLC thrust aanslag CRI Marxist Soviet assassination Kennedy -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Re: why make partitions?
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.) -- PGP Public Key available on request: Type Bits/KeyIDDate User ID pub 1024/CFED2D11 1998/03/05 Lazarus Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] Key fingerprint = 98 2A 56 34 16 76 D5 21 39 93 99 EA 89 D4 B5 A2
RE: why make partitions?
I used to wonder the samething. When I started using Linux, I always wonder why partition a disk to use the same OS on all the partitions. Then I made a big boo boo and hosed system and re-installed all 500MB of downloads again, that took over a week to get!! So, I decided to try the partition and I even dedicated partition to only hold .debs and .tars and all downloaded stuff like that. So then nexted time I hosed my system, I used the floppies to install the /root system and bam. /usr was the and all the link where fixed and I had my same set up in 20 minutes that took weeks to build. I know this didn't answer the technical reason, but it sure is great if your prone to experimention and complete system hosing. Rod -Original Message- From: Jens B. Jorgensen [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 3:46 PM To: Remco van 't Veer Subject: Re: why make partitions? 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. Remco van 't Veer wrote: Hi, Is the any technical reason why I should fdisk an extra IDE hdd and not mkfs the whole thing at ones? Apart from: hdb: unknown partition table at boot time everything works perfectly.. Any thoughts? Regards, Remco -- Kosto World Trade Center anthrax plutonium SEAL Team 6 Nazi nuclear BATF Ft. Meade Uzi FNLC thrust aanslag CRI Marxist Soviet assassination Kennedy -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Re: why make partitions?
This extra hdd is mounted on /home. :) My concern is the the integrity of the filesystem and hdd driver in this case. Does a filesystem like this use the location the partition table uses? If so how big are the odds that Linux will choke on a corrupt (unknown) partition table? I guess it's not harmful but bad style.. On Tue, Jun 01, 1999 at 14:46, Jens B. Jorgensen wrote: 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. Remco van 't Veer wrote: Hi, Is the any technical reason why I should fdisk an extra IDE hdd and not mkfs the whole thing at ones? Apart from: hdb: unknown partition table at boot time everything works perfectly.. Any thoughts? Regards, Remco -- Soviet counter-intelligence encryption social RAF sigar Ft. Bragg bomb mutageen XTC BATF colonel confidential South Africa plutonium CD
Re: why make partitions?
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
