How should I partition my 20gb HD?

[igwk]

I've got a single 20gb hard drive and I'm wondering what the best partition scheme would be for my drive. The box I'll be installing on has 256 megs of RAM (I plan to upgrade it to 512 sometime in the near future but probably after I've installed Gentoo) and I plan to use it mainly for Desktop/Development use. Any thoughts on the best way to partition my drive?

Thanks in advance!

[bsolar]

Id do a 100Mb boot partition, 512Mb swap and the remaining root.

Even if the default suggestion is 2xRAM I think 512Mb is a safe size. I have 512Mb RAM and 1Gb swap but never used more than 10% of it.
_________________
I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.

[rtn]

I firmly believe that disk partitioning is a matter of personal preference.
Aside from a few gotchas, like /etc being part of /, really the sky's the limit.
On some of my machines, I only mount /, /boot, and /home. Others, I mount
/, /boot, /home, /usr/local, /var/log, etc. It really depends on what I'm going
to use the server for and how critical the data is.

--rtn

[bsolar]

[RobertTheBruce]

I normally make the following partitions on my 20Gb hard drive

50-100MB /boot
512MB Swap (2x RAM)
8GB /
/home (this uses what is left over)

[hawson]

Splitting off /var can be a good idea as well, especially for servers. Most logs should be in /var/log, as well as any runtime data that needs to be preserved (stuff like .rpm databases on Redhat systems). If /var fills up, you still have space on /, which may allow you to login and fix the problem.

Generally, I have /, /boot, and /var. I haven't split /usr from / in the last 5 years on any system, mostly becuse there can be things in /bin, /sbin, and /lib linked against libraries in /usr/lib. If /usr doesn't come up, your hosed. For my personal systems, I usually leave /home on the same partition as /, but on workstations and servers, /home is usually an NFS mount of some sort. Lastly, I deal with a lot of users who have *huge* data files (scientific reserach folks) that can be multi-GB in size. I have a shared /data partition, or two or three, for those.

--Hawson

[TecHunter]

can i ignore /boot,because i have only gentoo on my hd?

[henrico]

Yes, you can also keep '/boot' in /. Just don't forget to alter fstab.
But if you want to experiment with a new install on a separate partition, then putting /boot on its own partition is very useful.

Also, you can use LVM or EVMS if you want separate partitions for /, /boot, /home, etc., but you are not sure how large to make everything. LVM and EVMS make it easier to move partitions around and resize them.

[CountZero]

I would say if you're going to have a lot of data in /home, partition that. That way if you system gets fubar'd somehow you can reformat all your other partitions without losing you're saved data.

My setup looks like this:
/boot 50M (actually quite larger than it needs to be) ext2
/ 100M ext2
/usr 5G reiserfs
/home 20G reiserfs

In the past when I've messed up my system, all I have to do is reformat / and sometimes /usr but I keep my kernel, and my home dir.

[uziel]

I always wondered why the install guide recommends to create a /boot partition of 100MB in size, which actually is VERY huge. Even though I create backups of any kernel image, I never got to fill it up to more than 6MB, and for instance the LFS Guide recommends /boot to be 8-16MB in size, AFAIR. And that is really more than sufficient! The problem would probably be ReiserFS, creating a journal of 32MB per default, always, everywhere... Knowing that, I use ext2 on /boot and Reiser for everything big enough to justify the 32MB "loss" for the journal, which are then again be made null and void by the better space allocation ReiserFS provides.

In short terms - why not use a 8MB ( or 16MB tops!) ext2 /boot and <your favourite journaling fs> for the rest, placing both inside the kernel image?

Chris

[bsolar]

[uziel]