[NTLUG:Discuss] Adding new hard drive

[MontyS@videopost.com]

Regarding partitioning:

I have spoken with a number of people in the past, and have yet to find any
compelling reason for having multiple partitions on a system.  I am
basically guessing, but I think the whole partitioning thing was valid when
drive sizes were measured in megs, not gigs.  I just run one / partition on
all our SGI and linux boxes (except the ftp server), and have never had any
problems.  You can easily run into a brick wall if you set up partitions
without a look into the future.

That being said...

I find it comforting to put the /usr (or /home) on a different drive than
the rest of the os.  The same would apply if you have any /pub like
partitions for ftp or web serving.  I like to keep the os install as
pristine as possible, and let the users thrash on another drives.

So, you might want to keep the drive you have in the system where it is, and
install your new hard drive for use as the /usr partition.

If this is just a hobby/utility Linux box, and your main os is still Windows
(please, no attacks...), then I would just keep one drive for Windows and
the second drive for Linux.

During installs, I have never let Disk Druid do it's own thing.  IMHO, it is
best to define your own parameters, and make sure Disk Druid isn't doing
something stupid.  Actually, if you want to, back everything up and play
around with fdisk some.  The command line is still your friend. :>

HTH, and good luck,

Monty

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Wayne Dahl [SMTP:w.dahl4 at verizon.net]
	Sent:	Thursday, August 08, 2002 2:46 PM
	To:	NTLUG Discussions
	Subject:	[NTLUG:Discuss] Adding new hard drive

	Hi all. 

	I have some questions about adding a new hard drive. 

	When I installed RH 7.3 on this box, I had only about 2 Gigs of
space to
	do it in.  I have bought a 40 Gig drive I'm installing on this
machine
	and don't really want to have to start over with everything. 

	I have a CDRom burner on the machine and have gotten X-CD-Roast set
up,
	although it hasn't been tested.  I only have about 26 Megs of drive
	space left for the image files (not enough to do backups?) and need
to
	know a few things. 

	1.  What's the best way to go about adding this drive?  Would it be
best
	to back up the directories that contain my user info and configs and
	just reinstall the OS on the new drive and restore from the backups?
If
	so, which directories should I back up? 

	2.  Does the /boot partition HAVE to be on /dev/hda?  Can it be on
	/dev/hdb,  provided LILO knows where to find it? 

	3.  The last time I installed RH on this machine, I let Disk Druid
	select how it was set up.  It set up 2 partitions.../boot and / with
	everything else under /.  I've read some things suggesting that some
of
	the directories should have their own partitions...such as /, /root,
	/usr, /tmp, /var and /swap, among others.  Disk Druid set them all
up
	under one big partition the last time.  Should I let it do so again
or
	set up different partitions for each?  I plan to either wipe out the
	existing partition on /dev/hda and use it as a Win98 partition,
thereby
	segregating both O/S's to their own drives, or to give maybe 5 or 10
	Gigs of the secondary master to Win98, leaving what I have on
/dev/hda
	and partitioning the rest of the new drive to Linux. 

	If setting up separate partitions for the different directories is
	recommended, what sizes should the partitions be?  I understand /usr
and
	possibly /home should have the vast majority of space allocated. 

	I had run out of disk space and Evolution had a conniption fit.
When it
	couldn't write email to the drive, it gave up, returned an error
(can't
	remember exactly what it was) and died.  When I rebooted and
restarted
	Evolution, it kept wanting me to reset it up...reset the accounts. 
	Fortunately, it remembered all the mail boxes and emails that were
in
	there, but I had to set it up several different times.  I was
beginning
	to wonder if it was going to keep asking me to reset up the servers
and
	account info every time it fired up, but after 3 or 4 times (several
as
	my normal user and once as root), it's regained its memory and seems
to
	be working ok now (after I removed some RPM's I had installed to
clear
	some space).  Gnome also forgot my desktop settings and defaulted
them
	again.  It wouldn't let me set them back up until I had cleared some
	space on the drive...hence the need for the new drive. 

	I knew I was going to have to do this anyway...so...now I get to
learn
	this.  :) 

	Thanks in advance for your thoughts. 

	Wayne 



	_______________________________________________
	http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://ntlug.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20020808/59f3d78d/attachment.html