How do you partition your drive?
I’m sick like a dog, and I’m heading to bed in couple of minutes. So instead of posting a lengthy rant or something funny, constructive or informative, I decided to take the lazy way out and ask you, the readers, a question.
How do you partition your hard drive?’
Travis asked me a question about it today, and it got me thinking. Do you usually go with the default partitioning recommended by your system (ie. a single big partition for Windows, and the common / + swap setup for Linux) or do you carefully define your own partitions?
Currently the Kubuntu install on my laptop has the default root + swap setup. There’s also a small NTFS partition on it with Windows 2000. I booted into that partition exactly twice. The first time was right after installation. The second time was after I installed Kubuntu - to verify that GRUB has the correct entry for Windows.
My destkop is also a dual boot. Since I use it for gaming, and I never really shut it down it’s booted into Windows 99% of the time. The ancient Mandrake install haven’t worked for about 2 years now. Around that time I upgraded my graphics card I never bothered to change the X config .
The primary drive has a 70 GB NTFS partition which hosts the system files, a 20 GB data partition (NTFS), 10 GB ext3 partition for root, 18 GB ext3 partition for /home and little under 2 GB for swap. The second hard drive is a one big 160 GB NTFS partition where I store all my data, downloads and shit. I also have a 270 GB external LaCie which is dedicated for backups of the windows partitions.
Yes, it’s a mess but it kinda grew organically. Each partition on the primary drive has been resized at least twice. 
So, windows people - do you usually split your drive into system and data partitions or do you stay with the default setup? If you do define a data partition, do you usually hack registry to move the Documents an Settings or at least My Documents to the data partition?
Linux and unix users - do you usually put /var and /home on separate partitions? How about /tmp and /usr? I always seem to have a hard time figuring out how big to make the /var partition. What do you usually do?
Let me know.
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June 14th, 2007 at 2:05 am (4777) [Quote]
Yey, I got a blog about my delimia thing… Hopefully, I will get this working without losing everything on my computer
Posted usingJune 14th, 2007 at 6:56 am (4778) [Quote]
For my desktop, I divide my 250GB drive into a 100MB /boot, ~10GB / and the rest for Windows. My laptop has the same configuration, just less space for Windows.
When it comes to servers, I have seperate /boot, /, /var, /usr and /home partitions, and often another one for /opt for backups. I could type out their sizes, but df -h is much easier
Posted usingJune 14th, 2007 at 7:51 am (4779) [Quote]
My old laptop only has a 10 gb hard drive, so I just put a / and a swap on it.
On my desktop I have:
/dev/sda1 /boot 100 mb
/dev/sda2 / 5 gb
/dev/sda3 /home the rest of the 80 gb drive
/dev/sda5 swap 1 gb
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/data 120 gb
On virtual machines, I don’t really bother with complicated partitioning, as they are mostly just for testing, so a / and a swap is sufficient there as well.
Posted using Unbranded Firefox 2.0.0.4 onJune 14th, 2007 at 9:20 am (4780) [Quote]
I have:
-a 40Gb drive for my Windows, which is way too small because my downloads folder is on this one too, I need to change this sometime…
-a 80Gb drive for ‘my documents’ (pictures and downloads I’d like to keep)
-plus all my other shit on separate drives (e.g. music and movies)
All the drives have 1 partition
Posted usingJune 14th, 2007 at 10:51 am (4781) [Quote]
320GB hard drive, 50GB is for the Windows install + installed programs (started out as 10, then 20 but I kept hitting the limit so I gave it more than enough, its now about 50% full
The rest of the drive contains all my data, everything in Documents and Settings has moved to there, and yes I did the registry editing by hand, repeatedly. Damn thing kept screwing up in some other way and having to be reinstalled (OK, didn’t have to be reinstalled, but it was easier that way). So I can now find the relevant keys from memory, which I will now do to show off
Posted usingCurrent User > Software > Microsoft > Windows > Current Version > Explorer > User Shell Folders
June 14th, 2007 at 11:43 am (4782) [Quote]
Follow up question: what do you usually use for partitioning your drive?
Do you use the built-in tools in your OS?
Do you use some 3rd party tools to do it? And if yes, which one is your favorite?
Posted usingJune 14th, 2007 at 1:18 pm (4784) [Quote]
I have always kept two physical drives, one for /home and one for /, so I could upgrade my system without touching user data. With my latest machine I split /home up a bit more:
Posted usingFilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 36G 3.2G 31G 10% /
tmpfs 251M 0 251M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb3 48G 9.7G 36G 22% /home
/dev/hdb1 95G 2.3G 88G 3% /home/movies
/dev/hdb5 37G 23G 12G 67% /home/music
/dev/hdb2 48G 4.4G 41G 10% /home/pictures
Seems to be working well so far. No Windows partition to worry about, either
June 15th, 2007 at 2:21 am (4786) [Quote]
I just have my entire Linux system(s) on one large partition.
The real reason for having the Linux install span across multiple partitions was for the simple reason that hard drivers were, at one time, not large enough to host an entire system. Not that we have disks that are several hundred gigabytes, we really don’t need to anyway.
In any case, having everything on a single partition makes management much easier. I would rather resize only one partition if you were running low on space than /home /var etc. separately.
For the best partitioner, I would quickly count out MS’s disk management console. Almost every operation invloves reformatting
Posted usingI normally use the GParted live cd but there’s a bunch of other versions out there: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
June 15th, 2007 at 2:35 am (4788) [Quote]
timothyb89 said:
Actually there are many benefits to this. For example, if you ever decide to reinstall the system, you don’t need to worry about loosing data if your /home is on separate partition.
Also consider fragmentation. If you put the directories that are bound to change a lot (ie. /home, /var, /tmp and etc) on separate partitions then the system partition that is mostly static doesn’t get fragmented which in turn improves performance.
Posted usingJune 15th, 2007 at 3:30 am (4789) [Quote]
On windows I like to have three partitions for some inane reason. Smallish C: drive for Windows & ‘OS’ apps like word processors and tools, medium D: for programs (mostly games) and ‘risky’ software that might hose something, and a bulk data e: drive. That way I can screw up the programs drive and not affect the windows or bulk data, and my bulk data is never going to fill up my C: to the point of wiping out the swapfile. Screwing up D: will screw up games but not ‘productivity’ software which is kept on C:.
On linux, I am essentially a newbie, and a sysadmin friend advised for home systems, the ‘one big partition’ theory is enough. For a production system, perhaps something else, but for home use it seems to be fine. I just have to be careful when I’m using disk management tools
Interestingly, the system I used at home with Debian 3.1 wouldn’t install properly with XFS, so I had to make a 200MB ext3 /boot to get it booting properly. I wanted to reinstall anyway when Debian 4.0 became stable, and it didn’t have the same problem - it’s all XFS.
Posted usingJune 15th, 2007 at 12:33 pm (4792) [Quote]
I have a Ubuntu live CD kicking around so I use GParted from that (been meaning to install + use Ubuntu for a while but there’s been various things delaying, maybe preventing me
and the fact that I’m kinda lazy is just one of those things
Posted using