Ubuntu Installation using several partitions

[mark]

Carthik Sharma Wrote: 
> Can someone please educate me as to the merits of using a seperate
> /home, /boot and / ?
> Also, I would love to know the minimum required space for these, and
> the best way to partition a 40G drive to use these seperate
> partitions.
> 
> I have /home on the same partition as /. now is there a way to move
> /home onto a new partition all of it's own? I guess I want to
> repartition my HDD without losing data, is there a good way to do
> this?
> 
> thanks,
> Carthik.
>  In my opinion, it's a matter of safety & decentralization.  By having
/, /home. etc. on separate partitions, if one of 'em gets bollixed up,
that's the only one you lose.  For example, my system currently looks
like: 

Code:
--------------------
    mark at host:~ $ df -h
  Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/hda3              12G  346M   11G   4% /
  tmpfs                 498M     0  498M   0% /dev/shm
  /dev/hda2             189M   45M  144M  24% /boot
  /dev/hda5              12G  570M   11G   5% /home
  /dev/hda6              12G  1.5G  9.0G  15% /usr
--------------------
 Another advantage is that it becomes easier to backup /home or /usr or
whatever.

I think just about everybody has their own ideas on how to size the
partitions.  I've always heard that the /swap should be c. 2X RAM - so
in my case (1GB RAM), my /swap I sized at 2GB.  I set up a separate
/usr at 12GB since that's where I install all additional apps.  I
wanted room to grow in /home so, again, 12GB.  I've always "felt" that
/ should have lots of space - 12GB again.  /boot, however, doesn't seem
to need much space at all, so I set it up at c. 200MB.

I understand that it's possible to resize partitions (depending on the
filesystem - I'm using ReiserFS across the board), but I've been so
unsure of my understanding of the process that I've never tried it (I'm
a great chicken, given a chance!).  I've just tried to think about and
carefully plan my filesystem layout before the install.

Hope this helps a little...

Regards,

Mark


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mark