[ubuntu-uk] killed box through /var :P

[Liam Proven]

2009/1/6 Neil Greenwood <neil.greenwood.lug at gmail.com>:
> 2008/12/23 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
>>[snip]
>> Now, partition it thus:
>>
>>  - 1 primary partition, ext3, 150GB (or whatever half the free space is) as /
>>  - 1 extended partition of all the rest of the space
>> in the extended partition:
>>  - 1 logical partition of 151GB (or whatever the other half is) as /home
>>  - another logical paritition, from there to the end of the disk, as swap
>>
>
> You don't need the primary partition with Linux. You can make one
> extended partition that fills the disk and then put all the logical
> partitions in there for /, /home, swap, etc.
>
> Only Windows requires a primary partition, and it needs to be
> bootable. Linux doesn't even need the boot flag.

You don't /need/ it but there is no reason to avoid it. If you have
only an extended partition on the drive, you lose the first couple of
cylinders or so - dozens of meg on a modern drive, for no reason
whatsoever.

The "standard" layout is 1 primary + 1 extended containing logicals.

On DOS-based OSs, there is good reason to use only logicals on all but
the 1st drive, because it makes drive letter assignment by the OS.
This is true by default even on NT, 2K and XP, tho' you can manually
redefine drive letters on these. Vista simply ignores them and calls
the boot drive C: as far as I can tell with my experiments so far.

The restrictions and limits of the PC BIOS and other OSs run deep; to
flaunt them for no reason is asking for trouble.

-- 
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