Partitioning strategies (was Re: [TriLUG] partitioning: primary or logical)

[Ben Pitzer]

Okay, I'll open this up to the general public.  I have two disks in my
Debian box, and to be perfectly honest, unless you are mounting multiple
disks, I find it very wasteful to overpartition a hard drive.  Creating
partitions like this was a way to use multiple disks within a system,
each for a filesystem.  For the average user, I find that a single /
partition, or perhaps a /boot and a / in the case of RH or Mandrake
users, is usually sufficient.  I came to this conclusion in painful
ways.  First, if all the partitions are on one disk, it doesn't make a
difference in terms of disk error recovery.  If the disk has a bad
sector, that's one thing, but how often these days does that happen? 
Typically, the entire disk fails, in which case having multiple
partitions won't make that much of a difference.  Am I wrong about
this?  I don't have much experience with data recovery (and how much
would that cost the average user anyway?  Is it worth it to get your old
email from Gramma?)

Additionally, I found that I was misappropriating my paritions.  Too
often, I would overuse one partition quickly, and run out of space
there, yet only be using tiny portions of my other partitions.  Thus,
while the disk would only be 30-40% used, I would be at 98% on one
partition.  Granted, that's the fault of the partitioner, however it's
just easier, less complicated, and less likely to cause problems if I
just have fewer partitions.

Any thoughts on this?  I really think that there is very little wrong
with creating just a / and swap, or a /boot, root and swap partition in
the majority of cases.

Regards,
Ben Pitzer



On Wed, 2002-05-15 at 17:54, Stephen R. Morris wrote:
> 
> 
> I'd like to create the following partitions:
> 
> /boot
> /
> swap
> /tmp
> /usr
> /var
> /home
> /opt
> /win   [i.e. accessible from Linux and Win98]
> 
> (NOTE: The disk drive is new and is dedicated to Linux; it's the IDE
> slave.)
> 
> The question is: Does it matter which partitions are physical (primary)
> and which are logical (part of the extended partition)?
> 
> Thank you.
> Steve Morris
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