On Saturday 08 September 2007 01:45, Mike McMullin wrote:
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)
Mike,thanks for replying. You have answered some of my nagging questions about usability.
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.
That explains quite a bit.
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?
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.
Yeah, I guess I could do that. Move it inside the extended partition or another drive, but then I couldn't use that empty primary because it would be isolated between the /swap and the extended partition and not be able to access the free space left on the disk behind the extended partition as Felix explained. Wonderful ! What dumbness in the original partitioning scheme I made.
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.
OK, so I really only need one /swap for 10.0, 10.2, and the future 10.3, right?
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.
Understood and appreciative of your strategy.
Love to hear your individual strategies.
Bob S. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org