Out of Space

[Liam Proven]

On 6 August 2016 at 21:06, Ralf Mardorf <silver.bullet at zoho.com> wrote:

Ralf, this is not really productive or helpful.

> On Sat, 6 Aug 2016 20:01:21 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
>>/dev/sda1 ... /boot ... 2GB
>
> I would add /boot to / and don't give it its own partition, so required
> space is automatically allocated, if needed.

I know that, Ralf.

But it is to alleviate possible problems with booting the kernel off
the *2nd* HD.

>>/dev/sda2 ... extended... all remaining space
>>/dev/sda5 ... /home ... *inside* /dev/sda2 ... all remaining space
>
> I don't use a separated /home partition either, but nothing is speaking
> against giving /home it's own partition. Some people consider that
> having /home on its own partition, as being an advantage, so this is ok.

He has 2 hard disks. He needs to if he is to use the space on the 2nd drive.

> _But_ just formatting one primary partition is a bad habit, since some
> operating systems, e.g. FreeBSD require a primary partition and you
> never know, if you one day might want to test such an operating system.

[1] Wrong. It is a _good_ habit. It is the MS-DOS standard way and
avoids problems. E.g. Win10 Anniversary Update, released last week,
which is wiping unrecognised partitions on some systems.

Stick to the legal way.

[2] If, *as is already the case on this machine*, you have 4
primaries, then you cannot modify or replace anything without first
removing one of them, risking possible data loss.

Again, I thought about this before making any recommendations, based
on 28 years of professional PC partitioning knowledge.

> So format your drives like this
>
> /dev/sda1 primary
> /dev/sda2 primary
> /dev/sda3 primary
> /dev/sda4 extended
> /dev/sda5
> /dev/sdan

***NO!*** This makes it impossible to add more partitions and is very
bad advice.

It is perfectly possible to add new primaries afterwards. This is
_DISASTROUSLY_ bad advice!



> /dev/sdb1 primary
> /dev/sdb2 primary
> /dev/sdb3 primary
> /dev/sdb4 extended
> /dev/sdb5
> /dev/sdan

NONONONONO *NO*!

This is a _terrible_  idea based on bad assumptions and lack of consideration.


>
> n is for as much partitions you like. However, don't make the
> partitions to small. Format all partitions to ext4, but format one
> partition on each HDD as a Linux swap. While all ext4 partitions should
> be around <= 20 to >= 60 GiB (sure, it depends on the size of your
> HDDs ;), so you might not want to have that much partitions), the two
> swaps should be as large as the RAM of your computer, to be able to
> suspend to disk,without the need to care about the compression.

OMG NO!

Dear gods, do you WANT to make it as bad as possible?

This is a roadcrash!


> IOW each HDD should have it's own swap

NO!

> and assuming you've enough
> space, three primary partitions.

NO! Oh HELL no!

> Use one large partition for /, including /boot, don't split it.

Contentious.


>
> Use another large partition for /home, but also consider to have a
> partition for special data, e.g. videos, documents, virtual machines
> etc. (IMO you not necessarily need a separated /home).

No!

We already know that we must keep it simple! This is disastrous,
epically bad, road-crash terrible advice!

> For performance reasons it could be an advantage to have /home and data
> partitions on one HDD and / on the other.

My suggestion did that before you needlessly over-complicated it.

I cannot imagine how you could make *worse* recommendations unless you
suggested LVM and encryption!



>  You also could make
> "backups" (quotation marks, because a backup should be made on an
> external drive) in the future from sda to sdb and from sdb to sda, so
> assumed one drive should fail, the other drive still contains its
> content.
>
> 2 Cents,

You should pay him for the damage, confusion and panic you are causing.

Ralf, this is the worst, most misguided advice I have _EVER_ seen
_anyone_ give in my 21 years in the Linux community.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)