On Sat, 2007-08-09 at 00:49 -0400, Bob S wrote:
Hello SuSE people,
This is especially for you guys/gals that run 3or 4 os's on a big hard drive. How do you handle the primary and extended partitions?
A while back I purchased a 250 GB Sata drive, intending to install different os's and or versions of SuSE. I installed 10.2 on my shiny new drive but I stupidly partitioned 3 primaries, /, /swap, and /home, and used the fourth primary for the extended partition. Dumb move - Out of partitions with about 150GB of free space. (I run 10.0 on another small IDE drive)
I've got a big HD on my main system, and I'm running 5. Two Os's on one one hd and three are on the big drive. The one with three partitions I set up as such: hdb1=swap, hdb2=/ for 10.1, hdb3=/home for 10.1, then there is an extended partition where hdb5=/ for 10.2, hdb6=/home for 10.2, hdb7=/ for LinuxXP. I do have on hda2 a swap partition, on hda1 Windows XP, on hda3 Ubuntu root, and on hda4 Ubuntu Home.
Now, I guess I could move my /home and /swap into the extended partition to free up two primary partitions. Hopefully that would give me access to the rest of the unused space on the drive. I always liked having my /home on it's own partition to guard it from mishap. Now, here are some of my questions:
Is the /home as safe residing in the extended partition? I could never delete or change the extended partition because they would wipe out /home - right? u Yes to both, almost. You could always backup your /home partition to move it to a new hard drive. Strategies for this have been discussed ad nauseum on this list over the past 18 or so months.
Is it a good idea to have /swap on the extended partition? Do you use the same /swap for all of the os's? (e.g. like my /swap for 10.0 on the IDE drive?)
I have my swap in a primary partition on any drive that I have a swap on, and I have the 4 Linux's use the swap partition on hdb. I'm keeping the one on hda there in case I remove my hdb. I'll tweak Ubuntu to use it using a live cd to make the edit to fstab.
How do you manage to run 3 or 4 os variants on just 4 primary partitions?
I give my heavy lifting/everyday Linux the primary partitions and use the extended partition for checking out other releases/distros.
Love to hear your individual strategies.
Anxiously awaiting the final 10.3 so I can try Compiz-Fusion, Beryl whatever and be able to fall back to 10.2 when I screw it up.
Bob S.
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