On Sunday 21 December 2003 6:27 am, Linuxjim wrote: [reordered slightly]
I tried using the Suse Live Eval disk for 9.0 ... I ran Yast from there and used Partitioner there and it worked great
Cool! I should note this for members of my user group who might ask a similar question... ;)
I resized the one large partition down to about 20GB. [and later asked] Also, should the newly created partitions be primary or extended???
Due to things that might even predate Microsoft's "hand" in things, hard disks can only have 4 "partitions" -- typically, only one would be considered "active" [this is the one that "boots"] Dos/windows would only recognize one active partition, which made it pretty easy to "dual boot" to "some other OS" by simply changing which partition was "active" [also, since each partition was seperate, you didn't have to worry about one OS clobbering the data of another...] It soon became obvious that 4 partitions aren't enough, so a workaround was created whereby one of the partitions could be made an "extended" partition -- this would also be "available", but it wouldn't be the "active" [boot] partition. Within this partition, you could make quite a few more partitions [there is probably a limit, but I've never run into it...] So, "with all that said..." you typically want to make all of the "free space" you've opened up an "extended" partition, and from there you would assign other [logical] partitions to hold the rest of your data.
Now, what would be a logical use of the remaing space. I have read that some users put their home dir on another partition, and perhaps usr as well. What is a logical structure for a home user??
SuSE's admin guide/user manual talks about this a bit, but as you've already figured out, no two installations are alike -- what's good for one situation may not be suitable for another. In general, however, putting the "/home" portion of the directory tree in it's own partition is widely accepted as "a good thing" -- when you update your system [to 9.1, 10.x, or even a completely different distro] you don't have to "back up and restore" your (personal) data since a new installation can be set to "not format the /home partition" [in windows terms, think of it as having placed your "my documents" folder on drive D: instead of C:...] putting /var in it's own partition helps eliminate "typcial unix problems" when you get a "runaway" process that is logging data (typically to /var/log/ messages) -- most unix installations [even windows, for that matter] really doesn't like it when "the root partition" fills up -- by placing /var in it's own partition, you avoid this (often hard to recognize) problem [aside: once I started a process that backgrounded itself without my knowing it, and it was logging a block of data every 2 seconds -- several days later, the system stopped with "out of disk space" messages...] -- Yet another Blog: http://osnut.homelinux.net