new hard drive setup

[Rick Stevens]

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

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.

If you could provide some details on what you wish to do, we could be
of more help.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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