Large HD patitioning scheme - help [solved]

huckabuck · Last edited by huckabuck on Tue Apr 22, 2008 8:42 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hello , im running successfully gentoo 2007.0 on an ibm T30 , with an ata/ide 40 gig 4200 rpm drive , and looking to upgrade to a 160 or 200 gig 7200 rpm drive . Right now i'm running the 2.6.23-r8 gentoo-sources kernel and using xfce4 desktop and am wondering , do i need to use lvm/lvm2 to partition either of these big drives , will i have to deal with any LBD issues if say i just partition this new drive to say something like this using fdisk ;

/dev/hda1 /boot ext2 100 MB
/dev/hda2 /swap swap 2 GB
/dev/hda3 / ext3 147 GB(the balance of the drive on one large root partition)

I just want to keep this is as simple as possible , and wont be adding any other OS to this drive , but at the same time dont want to lose any drive space or funtionality of the large size of the drive .

Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated .

Respectfully
Tom

gerard27 · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 3:36 pm Post subject:

Hi huckabuck,
I'd suggest to have a separate /home partition.
In case of a crash of your system it's easier to retrieve your data.
I have this:

jcat · Veteran Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 1337

Regarding the size of the disk/partition, modern Linux kernels are quite capable of addressing large disks! No need for LVM if you don't require it.

I nearly always mount /var/ separately (makes it a location where files can grow out of control without upsetting the rest of the system too much), and /usr/ is a good one as well (it's sometimes good to mount it with different options to the rest of the system (especially on Gentoo).

And yes, /home/ can be a good idea as well

Cheers,
jcat

huckabuck · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 7:09 pm Post subject:

Ok , i had to settle for a 5400 rpm , 160 ... everything on the shelves now is Sata so at least now i have little speed bump , and some much needed hard drive space .

Thanks for the tips .

Gentree · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 9:54 pm Post subject:

never found any speed bump on SATA , it's mostly hype, just got pissed off with being limitted to 16 partitions. I like to keep partitions small and light , it makes backing up a whole lot eaiser , faster and more likely to happen.

I pull all portage stuff out to a separate partition by playing with /etc/make.conf , I format it as reiser4 which seems fastest for this sort of usage.

The main reason /var gets big is PORTAGE_TMPDIR

_________________
Linux, because I'd rather own a free OS than steal one that's not worth paying for.
Gentoo because I'm a masochist
AthlonXP-M on A7N8X. Portage ~x86

jcat · Veteran Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 1337

Agreed.

The SATA bus is capable of faster transfers than PATA, but the bottleneck is still the drive itself. Platter density and spindle speed all effect your actual transfer rate, so bigger drives and faster drives all help to increase speed more than the the possible bus throughput.

Cheers,
jcat

huckabuck · Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 5:05 pm Post subject:

Ok , so now i'm in a pickle ... i've been working on installing a fresh gentoo onto hte new drive , and i'm using the minimal install disc , stage3-i686-2008.0-beta1.tar.bz2 . I get all the way thru the hand book , and its time to reboot and this is the kernel panic error i get ;

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

I've found grub error forum post , and was looking at Neddys reply about kernel modules ,

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-565750-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-200.html ,

so i was thinking ok , well i have the wrong parameters built into my kernel , let me go back , and redo my install from scratch , using these instructions ,

Code:
Device Drivers --->
< > ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support --->

turn off the ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support menu item entirely.
You may think this will prevent your CDROM working - it won't. I'll explain later.

Choose
Code:
<*> Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) drivers --->
<*> Intel ESB, ICH, PIIX3, PIIX4 PATA/SATA support

SCSI device support --->
Inside that menu choose
Code:
│ │ < > RAID Transport Class
│ │ -*- SCSI device support
│ │ < > SCSI target support
│ │ [*] legacy /proc/scsi/ support
│ │ *** SCSI support type (disk, tape, CD-ROM) ***
│ │ <*> SCSI disk support
│ │ < > SCSI tape support
│ │ < > SCSI OnStream SC-x0 tape support
│ │ <*> SCSI CDROM support

all thats fine and good , but i dont have an ICH7 board , i believe i have an ICH3/ISA/IDE board ...

(chroot) livecd / # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset Host Bridge (rev 04)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM USB Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM USB Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM USB Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 42)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801CAM ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801CAM IDE U100 Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM SMBus Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]
02:00.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1520 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01)
02:00.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1520 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01)
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82801CAM (ICH3) PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller (rev 42)

So after rebuilding to more times i get the kernel panic as above still and now i'm lost . Here is my fstab ;

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/p$
/dev/hda1 /boot ext2 noatime 1 2
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hda3 / ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,user 0 0

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0

Am i suppose to be formatting this drive from the beginning now with fdisk /dev/sda so the system is scsi now ???

i can post my last kernel config if needed . Can someone see what i'm doing wrong ?

Thanks in advance

dusanc · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 248 Location: Serbia

Just change those hda entries to sda in fstab and you should be ok.
No formatting needed.

huckabuck · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:28 am Post subject:

Well that helped thanks for that fstab tweak ... still wouldn't boot though .... i had to chroot back in and amend my grub.conf file and change root=/dev/hda3 to root=/dev/sda3

:lol:

Thanks guys ... i really appreciate all the help .