RE: why make partitions?
On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Person, Roderick wrote:
> I used to wonder the samething. When I started using Linux, I always wonder
> why partition a disk to use the same OS on all the partitions. Then I made a
> big boo boo and hosed system and re-installed all 500MB of downloads again,
> that took over a week to get!! So, I decided to try the partition and I even
> dedicated partition to only hold .debs and .tars and all downloaded stuff
>
> > From: Jens B. Jorgensen [SMTP:jjorgens@bdsinc.com]
> >
> > The best reason I can ever come up with for creating separate partitions
> > is to
> > allocate space which can't be spared: eg. create a separate /home so users
> > with
> > accounts on the system can't screw up the system by filling up the disk or
> > so that
> > runaway log files can't fill up / and screw things up.
> >
> > Remco van 't Veer wrote:
> >
> > > Is the any technical reason why I should fdisk an extra IDE hdd and
> > > not mkfs the whole thing at ones? Apart from: "hdb: unknown partition
> > > table" at boot time everything works perfectly..
As well as the other reasons, you can't predict what you are going to want
to do with the disk. Many people have had to re-partition their disks
because they lacked to elementary foresight to create multiple partitions
in the first place; and even if you plan to use fips or some other
supposedly non-destructive means, you aren't going to do that until you
have gone out and bought a tape drive, installed it, and backed up the
disk.
Well, you aren't unless you are prepared to lose everything on the disk,
or unless you are a little naive or reckless. The every first law of
computers is Murphy's, if anything can go wrong it will.
Multiple partitions are a little inconvenient when you have filled one and
another is empty, but you can even things up with symlinks, e.g. move
/usr/lib to a half-empty partition, and plant a symbolic link to it in
/usr, before upgrading from lib5 to lib6.
It doesn't do much harm to keep some of your spare disk space in some
spare partitions. Then you have more freedom to do things you haven't
thought of yet, or just now are sure you will never want to do, e.g.
increasing the size of your swap space.
The average size of new hard disks has been growing a lot faster than the
bloat of operating systems. The question you should probably be asking
is, when I have this huge blank space, do I have any sufficiently good
reason to not divide it into ten partitions before doing anything else?
In other words, you don't need a reason to carve it up, you need a reason
not to.
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