One over 300gb HD is totally free and my Questions is.
1 Should I use LVM base for partitioning my HD ?
2 Should I use LVM and Expert for partitioning my HD ?.
Thank you your are so kind for helping me.
Michael
There is no need to select LVM at least as it installs fine without. If the disk currently does not hold a partition then the openSUSE installer should suggest something like on image #3 here
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I find the LVM is very useful and convenient method of building partitions, without some of the caveats and restrictions.
However it means, making a small seperate /boot, and personally I dislike having ‘/’ in LVM (/usr and /var are fine), as it makes recovery of a system more difficult.
Though it works, I’ve had problems with initrd’s using 11.1-RC1, and would do in 11.1, if I had not alrady discovered what brokenmodules= paramaters to pass to installers.
The great thing is being able to grow (shrink?) partitions without worrying about what’s next to them. With real partitions, you might want to shuffle a partition along, but that is impossible, so you shrink one, or grow one and take space from it’s neighbour.
Then there’s features like ‘snapshot’ which is probably how “Restore points” are done in M$'s NTFS. Snapshots, might well save your bacon one day, as well as increasing the availability of a system because “maintenance” time will be reduced.
I have already few beers.
Ok lets go in a hour or two I will install Opensuse 11.1 with my ext.350GB HD it`s on win XP format,250mb Zip drive,HP Printer and my Digital usb camera.
I got 2x300gb+ internal HD,Nvidia 7100, audigy sound card
with 2 Monitor Viewsonic 19".
Check out that one
MD5 checker check it out 
- openSUSE Forums
Thank you your all be so kind to help me.
Michael lol!
If you are the typical home user, you can do without LVM. Just allocate about 20GB for / and the rest for /home. If you have other large directories, perhaps like /var/lib/mysql, make some symlinks into somewhere in /home. Then there is nothing you can expand since /home is at its maximum allocation already.
While LVM does allow you to increase storage capacity of (logical) partitions by adding more volumes without having to copy things to new disks, it also makes your system more brittle. If you lose one of the components, you can have hell of a time trying to recover the data. Just ask badger_fruit. A sysadmin with expertise and RAID arrays in the LVM can handle that, you may not.
When you run out on that 300GB disk, buy a larger disk and copy the stuff over. They’ll probably be up to 2TB this time next year.
And don’t forget to backup your data.
LVM is useful even just to manage 1 large partition area of a disk.
You don’t need to add partitions from more than one disk to make an LVM partition useful. Fedora 9 actually by default made whole of disk, apart from small /boot partition LVM based, though I’ve not checked Fedora 10 to see how it likes to operate.
If you have 2 large disks, then mirroring parts of them for important data will add considerably to the robustness of your installation against a hard disk failure.
There’s a cost in these ‘simple’ disk layouts with 100+ GB size, and that is vastly increased fsck(8) times, which grow closer to an exponential curve than linearly with partition size and used capacity.
It also gets you away, from these ‘device’ names, you can use something that is more meaningful, without the confusion of Labels, and odd options (though /dev/disk/by-labe does help this).
Mirroring or RAID is an orthogonal issue to LVM. You can always do that, LVM or not.
The size of the filesystem is also an orthogonal issue. LVM or not, you still have a large filesystem to fsck, it’s just that with LVM, the data is crosses physical disks. But as far as fsck is concerned it’s still one filesystem and has to be worked through. To be able to check in parallel you need to mount more filesystems. But then you are splitting up the pool with the risk of more fragmentation. Again that is a tradeoff that’s has to be considered, LVM or not.
As for meaningful names, mount by label or mount by id can give you that. Nothing obscure about mount by label, pretty obvious.