Partitioning 1tb drive

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Having finally, fully, forlornly but with fortitude decided to forsake the folly of a foolish, footloose and futile operating system I with fortitude and foresight forced myself to the edge of the cliff and flew off into the world of OpenSuse.

That was a month and a half ago. Not without problems or hard work was my flight made, but it has been made. Successfully.

Problem is, my hdd’s are jammed full with stuff that I really don’t want to get rid of. So, I bought me a 1TB drive to alleviate that problem and allow me to play at will. Now I have some questions.

And before I ask, yes I have researched and all I got was what but not why.

  1. According to partition rules you can have 4 primary partitions, one of which may be an extended partition which can have a number of partitions contained in it. The extended partition must be the last partition. In other words, you can have part1, primary, part2, extended (sda1,sda2, sda5, etc.) but could not then have part3&4. Is this correct, so far?

  2. The above applies to each drive device. Currently I have three HDD’s, two internal IDE, 120gb and 180gb and one USB 250gb. Only IDE0 is divided into multiple partitions, for WindowsXP and SuSE 11.2. But they all could be.

  3. I want to set up partitions for 4 or 5 OS’s on my new WD Caviar Black 1tb because it is faster than the others. At least, I think I do. I want to set up SuSE, osX and WinXP in VirtualBox. If this works out, the old c: with my current WinXP will be history. Yeah! I want these partitions, plus swap, in the first 200gb of the disk to take advantage of short stroking. If I understand correctly, I would have to set up the whole disk as an extended partition (using ext4, BTW) and then set up swap, root/home, root/home . . . partitions sequentially, then make the rest of the space the last partition. Correct so far, and does anyone have any better ideas?

  4. If I want to get another 1tb drive later and use them in hardware RAID, will I have to move everything off the current drive to set it up?

  5. How much space do you really need for a distro? I am planning to set up 20/20 partitions for each root/home, but my current install has 5.1/4.9 used for root/home (after you take out Azureus Downloads), although I have not installed any serious games yet. Still, I would not have more than 2 or 3 3D games at one time. How much room do you really need if you religiously move downloads and documents (using a script and scheduler?). And swap. I have 2gb DRAM and 2gb swap now; I have never seen more than 800mb memory used, so swap hardly gets touched, although I have not run any serious games or other heavy resource programs. How about some feedback from users as to how much you really need for your usage?

I know this is kind of long but I think these are questions a lot of newbies and not so newbies would like to understand better. Thanking the community in advance for your patience and help.

2

I stopped using swap partitions with openSUSE 11.1 and haven’t looked back.

As you discovered, with so much RAM I really don’t think they’re necessary in today’s home computer environment.

I don’t say that from an officially educated standpoint, but from simple experience.

So save yourself 2 gigs of wasted space :D.

3

Personally i still use swap with 2GB or RAM, mainly because it helps keep my computer up for long periods as this computer must always run to keep my home network up.

4

On 11/21/2009 11:46 AM, TaraIkeda wrote:
>
> Personally i still use swap with 2GB or RAM, mainly because it helps
> keep my computer up for long periods as this computer must always run to
> keep my home network up.

The swap space is also needed for hibernation.

5

On 11/21/2009 11:16 AM, BobTheBull wrote:
>
> Having finally, fully, forlornly but with fortitude decided to forsake
> the folly of a foolish, footloose and futile operating system I with
> fortitude and foresight forced myself to the edge of the cliff and flew
> off into the world of OpenSuse.
>
> That was a month and a half ago. Not without problems or hard work was
> my flight made, but it has been made. Successfully.
>
> Problem is, my hdd’s are jammed full with stuff that I really don’t
> want to get rid of. So, I bought me a 1TB drive to alleviate that
> problem and allow me to play at will. Now I have some questions.
>
> And before I ask, yes I have researched and all I got was what but not
> why.
>
> 1. According to partition rules you can have 4 primary partitions, one
> of which may be an extended partition which can have a number of
> partitions contained in it. The extended partition must be the last
> partition. In other words, you can have part1, primary, part2, extended
> (sda1,sda2, sda5, etc.) but could not then have part3&4. Is this
> correct, so far?

Almost. Usually, any primary partitions after an extended one are not used, but
that is not a hard-and-fast rule. In any case, one would usually create primary
data partitions 1, 2, and 3 with #4 as an extended partition. Note: The extended
one is only a container. It does not contain any place for data.

> 2. The above applies to each drive device. Currently I have three
> HDD’s, two internal IDE, 120gb and 180gb and one USB 250gb. Only IDE0 is
> divided into multiple partitions, for WindowsXP and SuSE 11.2. But they
> all could be.

If you want.

> 3. I want to set up partitions for 4 or 5 OS’s on my new WD Caviar
> Black 1tb because it is faster than the others. At least, I think I do.
> I want to set up SuSE, osX and WinXP in VirtualBox. If this works out,
> the old c: with my current WinXP will be history. Yeah! I want these
> partitions, plus swap, in the first 200gb of the disk to take advantage
> of short stroking. If I understand correctly, I would have to set up the
> whole disk as an extended partition (using ext4, BTW) and then set up
> swap, root/home, root/home . . . partitions sequentially, then make the
> rest of the space the last partition. Correct so far, and does anyone
> have any better ideas?

Most Virtual Machine guests have their disks in a VDI (Virtual Disk Image) file.
They have their own partitioning, which is never seen in the host. All the host
sees is this large XXX.vdi file. Your discussion of the extended partition is
wrong - see above.

> 5. How much space do you really need for a distro? I am planning to set
> up 20/20 partitions for each root/home, but my current install has
> 5.1/4.9 used for root/home (after you take out Azureus Downloads),
> although I have not installed any serious games yet. Still, I would not
> have more than 2 or 3 3D games at one time. How much room do you really
> need if you religiously move downloads and documents (using a script and
> scheduler?). And swap. I have 2gb DRAM and 2gb swap now; I have never
> seen more than 800mb memory used, so swap hardly gets touched, although
> I have not run any serious games or other heavy resource programs. How
> about some feedback from users as to how much you really need for your
> usage?

I always split /home from the rest. In most cases, 20 GiB is right for /, but my
/home needs to be bigger. I’m currently using 92 GiB and it has been 85% full.

6

If you are so short of disk space that 2GB matters to you… rotfl!

7

AFAIK RAID has to be set up from the beginning. To migrate to RAID you need to backup and restore.

+1 on the / and /home split. You probably won’t need to mess with extended partitions if you only have Linux and the rest in VMs. (Can you run OS/X in a VM though? Wasn’t clear from your phrasing if you were planning to run OS/X in a VM or just XP.)

You might want to put your VDIs somewhere on /home, say /home/vbox then they can be as big as you want.