new hard drive setup

[Kostas Sfakiotakis]

Greetings Rick ,

Rick Stevens wrote:
> Ralph E. Kenyon, Jr. wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> I got my start in Linux with a pre-configured system, and I'm still a 
>> rank  beginner.  My system is Redhat 9 kept up2date.
>>
>> My original hard drive is small (8G) partitioned as follows:
>>
>>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
>> /dev/hda1   *         1        13    104391   83  Linux
>> /dev/hda2            14       995   7887915   83  Linux
>> /dev/hda3           996      1027    257040   82  Linux swa
>>
>> My hard drive is nearly full, so I bought another one - 60G.
>> It's in, and I was able to see it with fdisk, but I haven't done any  
>> partitioning or formatting yet - I never did such things before.
>>
>> What I'm looking for is suggestions as to what would be a good way to  
>> partition it, and possibly what to put on it.
> 
> 
> Lordy!  Well, it rather depends on what you're planning to do.  If
> you wish to move your existing system to the new drive, that can be
> a bit complicated.  It's doable, but it's not for the faint-of-heart.
> 
> Should you wish to do that, a normal partitioning scheme we use is this:
> 
>     /boot        512MB - 1GB
>     /        2GB - 4GB
>     swap        twice your RAM size
>     /var        4GB (8GB if you have a lot of log activity)
>     /usr        rest of disk

Rick , if i might intrude and ask , what would a 1 GB boot
partition serve ?  Do you build the kernel in there ?  I have
never used a /boot partition and i don' t really know the need for
it unless you have a dual boot system with Windows XP on NTFS ?
One more thing is , for example i have 1,25 GB of RAM ( on My FC1 box )
and  a 2,5 GB swap partition which almost never get's used, even if it
get's used it is for a few MB ( 10 -15 MB ) . Is there a rule for
the RAM size and the Swap Partition size .


> 
> That's for a development box.  Servers usually have the /boot and /
> partitions smaller and the /var partition bigger due to the logging
> that goes on.
> 
> If you just want to use the secondary drive to hold miscellaneous stuff,
> it's rather like having a "D:\" drive in Windows...put whatever you
> want on it.

Well , if it is for whatever then i guess i would have to suggest that he
makes 2 partitions of  equal size , so  he might have the 2nd partition for
BACKUP .
If  i recall well an ancient riddle says that a " Good Backup never hurted
anyone "

Kind Regards,
   Kostas