Recommended partitioning scheme

[Andrew Konosky]

Well, I just use this computer as a desktop workstation. I keep windows 
98 installed so I can play games and because some other members of my 
family are very technology impaired when it comes to computers. I don't 
really need FC3, but I have an extra hard drive now becuase I bought one 
online, and it was defective, so I sent it back. The RMA exchange was 
going to take 2 weeks, so I bought another one at circuit city. Then 
they told me the first drive was "non-refundable," and I have this 
second hard drive sitting around doing nothing. I would try to sell it, 
but it's an OEM drive and you can get a 160gb Western Digital drive now 
for even less with all the rebates out now on regular ATA drives.

My computer is a self built AMD XP1800+ on a GA-7DX motherboard with 
512mb PC2100 RAM and Radeon 8500LE. I have enough RAM for most stuff, 
and I've only experienced one instance while running linux that the swap 
has actually been used, and it was only a 3% use. I had all sorts of 
programs running on all 4 of my workspaces.

Since I already have a 2gb swap partition on the first drive, I won't 
bother making a new swap on the second drive. I know in Windows, if you 
put the virtual memory on its own partition on a seperate physical drive 
from where the OS is installed, it can help performance because the two 
drives can be accessed at the same time, rather than a single drive 
multitasking between the OS and the swap space. I went ahead and made a 
2gb fat32 partition on the new drive for this purpose. Since I will have 
the same setup for linux (swap on 1st drive, OS on second) will I see 
any similar performace improvement when using swap in linux?

I don't need really want 2 installs of the same linux distro on my 
computer, and since FC3 is unstable still, I will just wait until it is 
in a release version and use FC2 as my primary OS. I might experiment 
with Suse or Debian or something, but have 2 Fedoras would be a waste of 
space for me.

I think what I will do is just do a new install of FC2 on the second 
drive and partition/configure it with a 100mb /boot, 30gb /home, and the 
rest on /. All my files that need backing up from my current install I 
have already fit on one CD, so I don't have much to reconfigure. This 
way I will have Fedora on its own drive and can use my windows drive as 
the experimental drive.

What would be the advantage of using an LVM filesystem on home rather 
than ext3? Right now, the windows drive is the master with grub on it. 
If the windows drive will be my experimental drive, I am guessing it 
would be better to put grub onto the Fedora drive since I won't be 
messing with it much? But then grub must also be on the MBR of the 
master drive, or will it work on the slave drive too?