On 2007/09/08 00:49 (GMT-0400) Bob S apparently typed:
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)
Not exactly dumb. Without "sacrificing" a primary for use as an extended, you're limited to 4 partitions total. There are only two ways to be out of available unpartitioned space to add a logical if an extended already exists: 1-100% of freespace is already allocated to partitions 2-all existing freespace is located in between two primary partitions neither of which is an extended partition If the latter is your problem, all primaries need to be made adjacent.
Is the /home as safe residing in the extended partition?
The difference between logical and primary partitions only matters to boot loaders and legacy DOS and windoz operating systems. Linux once booted sees partitions as partitions without distinction between logical & primary, which means there's no difference in "safety", whatever that means.
I could never delete or change the extended partition because they would wipe out /home - right?
The "extended partition" is nothing but a series of marker sectors pointing to partitions that don't have table entries in the MBR, plus a primary partition table entry that starts the marker chain by pointing to the first logical partition.
Is it a good idea to have /swap on the extended partition?
Linux doesn't care. Generally the best place for swap is wherever your disk's fastest access exists, usually but not always at or near the "front".
Do you use the same /swap for all of the os's? (e.g. like my /swap for 10.0 on the IDE drive?)
Linux installers generally will use every swap partition they can find. If you have multiple swap partitions, you'll have to manually change each new fstab to use whichever swap partitions you want used for that Linux.
How do you manage to run 3 or 4 os variants on just 4 primary partitions?
I doubt anyone does. There's no reason to. I usually have a maintenance and/or boot partition on the first, a boot manager on the second, a small primary type 0x06 for DOS and/or windoz, and everything else as logicals, typically more than 20 total per disk. On partitioning generally: http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/partitioningindex.html -- "It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be permanent, where the public worship of God, and the support of religion, constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape." Chief Justice Joseph Story Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org