Partition recommendations; fast hdds, file/media server

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I am having a rough time with installing 11.2 to my hdds.

Luckily I am only playing around and learning.

I have connected to the Sata ports on my evga 730i mobo:
2ea 74gb 15000RPM raptor drives (formated)
1ea 750gb 7200rpm (contains an old win7 ntfs partition with about 500gb of data)
1ea DVD-RW

My goal was to build a simple media box connected to my tv with SMB file shares so I could backup my movies from my other computers over the network to watch on this box at my convience. On top of this goal I wanted the system to auto log in and support opening of the media within 1-2 clicks (be as fast or faster than putting in a dvd movie and hitting play). At a later time I want to add another 750gb drive for media backups.

ROUND 1:

(this time around I kept the 750gb disconnected because I had some data on it I did not want to lose.)

I went through the installation about 4 - 5 times.
The first one I simply let auto config do the work. I managed to get to my desktop, change the resolution and then tried to restart. Upon restart it gave me a boot partition not found error. The next few installs I tried manual config.

As a beginner I get a little intimidated by the nix setup of 5/6 partitions with names like

part 1 as /sda/root
part 2 as /sda/swap
part 3 as /sdb/home
part 4 as /sdc/boot
part 5 as /hda/disk1
part 6 as /hdb/disk2
part7 as /hdc/somethingelsehere

I am guessing that “sda” is short for system disk and that “hda” is just extra hard drive space. I am so used to operating systems having 1 partition with all the files needed to run the computer that this really pushes me out of my comfort zone.

Anyhow it turned out my problem was not that I was setting partitions incorrectly (even though for the life of me I could not tell where in the pair of 74gb drives the actual files were being installed). My problem was that I missed a check box to set one of the partitions to be bootable…I either selected /root or /boot and now dont remember which it was. I was surprised that this option was turned off by default in the auto config.

In the end I found myself with a working linux system that could boot from the hdd (which one…i still dont know lol).

I next added the 750gb (ntfs) drive and it opened like a portable usb drive. Fine for my tests, but as I started using it later it required me to type the root password to open after each boot. Annoying. I tried to edit the fstab file and make it mount permanently but this simply made the drive disappear from the computer until I reverted it back to the original fstab.

I found a great guide on setting up windows file shares and managed to set up a working server on the first try. I was able to drop a few files onto the share I setup on the 750gb drive over my network…COOL…and after doing the media repo tweaks…got the media working.

ROUND 2:

With my learning from round 1 I am going to give it another go. I feel good about the media and networking parts. The disk management still irks me.

I have backed up the files I wanted from the 750gb to a 500gb on another machine so this time I can format and make it truely a part of the system.

This time around I will have all the drives connected. Here is my question after that tirade of text.

How should I set it up?
Here is my first guess:

all ext3 (i have used reiser…they both felt the same to me performance wise)

SATA A1
74gb Raptor
install /root, /swap, and /boot partitions here and give them each 1/3 of the disk space?

SATA A2
74gb Raptor
install /home here and use entire disk (is this where the programs are installed? or was it /root)

SATA B1
750gb WD
install /FILESERVER (custom partition) here and keep all my movies/music/other data on this disk

SATA C1
DVDRW drive

Does it work this way? (I’ll try in about an hour just for fun even if this thead dies to obscurity)
This motherboard does support raid and I have managed to set up a winXP install raid0 with the pair of raptors…not sure I want to do this with nix and its plethora of partitions.

2

Hello there and welcome to the linux world.

Since you are trying something new for an OS, I would suggest reading this: Concepts - openSUSE

I am guessing that “sda” is short for system disk and that “hda” is just extra hard drive space. I am so used to operating systems having 1 partition with all the files needed to run the computer that this really pushes me out of my comfort zone.

not quite. sdx - is used for sata disks; hdx - for ide / pata disks.

so sda: first sata physical drive (partitions have numbers added); hda - first ide physical drive

you do not mention ide disks so something is wrong in hardware detection there (or you do have IDE drives and than there is no error)

The naming is explained in the link I gave up here.

I next added the 750gb (ntfs) drive and it opened like a portable usb drive. Fine for my tests, but as I started using it later it required me to type the root password to open after each boot. Annoying. I tried to edit the fstab file and make it mount permanently but this simply made the drive disappear from the computer until I reverted it back to the original fstab.

fstab editing is not that easy if you do not know much about it.

for solving the ntfs hard disk mounting issue I would suggest to try the tool called ntfs-config (you will need to provide root passwd to run it)

is the 750Gb hdd an external USB drive or not? why do you say it was seen as a “portable USB drive”?

Here is my first guess:

all ext3 (i have used reiser…they both felt the same to me performance wise)

IIRC reseirfs was developed for giving high performance with small size files and you intend to use big sized files, ext4 or ext3 would be a better choice at least for the storage partitions.

of course swap partition will be formated as… linux swap

/boot and /root and /swap partitions do not need to be 1/3 of 74 gigs;

/boot can be about 100-150Mb

/swap: usually is 2x the RAM value

/root - do you intend to store 24Gb of data on the admin account?

you still need the / partition (depending on the software you will install can be 14-20Gb)

Maybe somebody else will give you a more precise recommendation on how to partition your hard-drives.

My opinion is that you can use one of the 74 for all the system (/boot / /swap /root /home ) maybe with a software raid ( How to install openSUSE on software RAID - openSUSE ) - hardware raid can be hard to cope with, and use the big hard drive for storing your media files.

Please read the first link I gave to get some knowledge about the new OS you are trying. More documentation links: Documentation - openSUSE

Cheers and good luck.

PS
Do you know there are also mediabox linux distributions out there, e.g. geexbox or linuxmce ?

3

cytog64, I am not sure where to begin since I don’t know what you know about computers. When talking about hard drives, most SATA and USB drive have a designation using /sda for the first drive, /sdb for the second drive and so forth, as assigned by your system BIOS based on a hardware order. The designations for /hda and /hdb were for older interfaces, such as IDE, now know as PATA.

Further, within each drive, you have some number of partitions. These are designated by adding a number at the end, such as /sda1 and /sda2 and so forth. Next, there are Primary Partitions and Logical Partitions on each hard drive where each drive has at least one partition. Any hard drive can have only a maximum of four partitions. However, if one of those partitions is a logical one, it could contain one or more logical drives which is just a way to get more than four partitions per hard drive.

Next, there is something called an Active or Booting partition. In your computer BIOS, you must select which hard drive is the boot drive. In Grub, the Operating System boot selector installed by openSUSE, what ever drive is selected as the boot drive in your BIOS is considered to be HD0 by Grub. HD0 can be any drive selection of /sda, /sdb as exists on your PC, but selected by you in your BIOS as the first drive to boot from. Once the boot drive is selected in the BIOS, one of the four Primary partitions must be designated at the ACTIVE or booting partition. In a normal boot process, the boot sector is loaded from the booting hard drive and the boot sector looks for the ACTIVE partition and Transfer control to the ACTIVE or booting partition. This is the most normal method when using Windows.

One thing to consider is if you have placed all of the hard drives you are using online and in the final booting order before you install openSUSE, most often it will select the best partitioning setup it can figure out. When existing partitions are present, it tries to re-size them instead of deleting them, more often than not. So, I would get rid of all partitions I do not want to use and leave all space unassigned I want openSUSE to use. If you do not do this, you must do a manual edit of the partition setup to get to the setup you really want to use.

openSUSE uses the Grub operating system selector as mentioned above. Grub has more than one way to install itself on your computer. By default, openSUSE will install Grub in the Master Boot Record also known as the MBR. Unlike a normal generic MBR boot process, when Grub is loaded into the MBR, it loads a small portion of itself and then goes for the rest of its install, located in the openSUSE /root partition by default (when located on the boot hard drive). Now openSUSE uses this method so that openSUSE could be loaded from ANY Primary or Logical partition on any hard drive of your system. I don’t like this method however for use in dual boot computer systems (say between Windows and openSUSE) as it does not work to boot Windows if anything should happen to Grub or openSUSE.

Normally, I elect to install Grub fully into the /root partition for openSUSE. That means that openSUSE must be installed in a Primary Partition and its Partition must be marked as the ACTIVE or booting partition. Such a setup is more compatible with Windows, though one would still need some other utility boot disk to switch the Active partition to Windows in the event Grub or openSUSE should become defective.

So, this is a lot of information. No way to know if it helps or not. But we are trying to go into the right direction for understanding your boot system and openSUSE.

Thank You,

4

Thanks for the reply.

I have been in the nix world since opensuse 8. I just disappeared from this set of forums when it changed homes. I installed and have been overjoyed(read it has run as her internet/printing machine for almost a year without me having to fix it in any way) with Unbuntu 9.4 on my mom’s computer.

So here is how my latest install went:

I got a hardware raid 0 working LOL : ) Everything just seemed to install to the array. Screaming fast! I tried the boot option “use MBR” and it worked (noticed also that I can “use /boot”.)

The large 750gb sataII drive is now seen as volume(ext3) and requires root password to open still : P

Going to try and install again and play with some more settings.

5

I did not read your whole story, but I think you are lacking some basic knowledge. Forgive me if I am wrong, but reading about /sda/swap let me stop and shiver.

This is something that could help here: SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE

6

Posting from a completed machine now. It is working great!

And thank you, this is the exact info i needed:

This is something that could help here: SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE

7

Nice the documentation helped. There is more in the SDB. Look around there if you have some time to spend.

8

As a side-note: The root of the file-system is actually / and not /root. /root is the user (superuser/administrator user in the windows world) root’s directory. It is similar in layout as your regular user’s home directory which is a sub-directory in /home, and has particularities not found with the regular users. This is one of the main reasons that *nix systems are significantly more secure than that other OS.

Hope that this can be put to good use.