Partition linux best practice

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Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by mike acker » Thu Feb 11, 2016 6:48 pm

any suggestions for a Best Practice for Disk Partitions?

should there be 1 Primary partition with 3 extended partitions?
1 — /
2 — /home
and
3 — /swap

evidently about 30 GB is enough for 1 and 3;
2 could be whatever — let’s say we split up a 1TB drive — make /home = 400 GB,—

this would leave space for a second primary partition — which could be 500 GB for a Windows install

there seem to be as many views on this as there are essays so I was hoping we have a recomendation for a Best Practice to get started on

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by Fred Barclay » Thu Feb 11, 2016 7:38 pm

That looks pretty good to me.

My setup:
24 GB /
84 GB /home
5 GB swap

/ and swap add up to 29 GB; just 1 GB short of your value.

I use GPT so extended/logical partitions are not a worry for me, but considering your scenario, keeping Mint inside an extended partition makes sense. That is—your disk used the MBR scheme, right?

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by austin.texas » Thu Feb 11, 2016 8:19 pm

mike acker wrote: any suggestions for a Best Practice for Disk Partitions?

should there be 1 Primary partition with 3 extended partitions?

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by Pierre » Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:18 am

under win-xp — you could do the whole lot with just primary partitions,
but with win-7 — that sometimes wants a boot partition as well,
and that now needs Five partitions — unless you don’t use a separate /home — that is.

the actual size(s) does really depend on the size of your HDD.
but — above mentioned size is quite reasonable.

my HDDs traditionally are quite small, and so are usually sized at about half of those mentioned.

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by BigEasy » Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:32 am

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by Pjotr » Fri Feb 12, 2016 5:40 am

Opinions differ and will continue to differ. I hereby predict that no consensus will be reached on a «best practice».

My take: just two partitions. One for root and one for swap. Root preferably on a primary partition; only on a logical one when unavoidable.

1. I consider a separate /home to be an unnecessary complication, because you need *external* backups of your documents anyway. Granted, it makes re-installing a bit easier, but how often do you have to re-install?
Furthermore, a separate /home causes less than optimal disk space allocation, which is especially annoying on small drives.

2. In my opinion a separate swap partition is needed because a. I think it’s useful when my system can swap under extreme duress and b. I don’t want the junk in the swap polluting my root partition (so I don’t want the swap to be a file on my root partition, like in Windows).

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by BigEasy » Fri Feb 12, 2016 6:09 am

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by Moem » Fri Feb 12, 2016 6:31 am

If your issue is solved, kindly indicate that by editing the first post in the topic, and adding [SOLVED] to the title. Thanks!

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by mike acker » Fri Feb 12, 2016 7:42 am

thanks for all the notes and input guys!

failing a «Best Practice» perhaps a Beginners’ Recommendation could be possible ?

the reason I ask is: when my Win7 box died I replaced the Hard Drive with a 1TB WD and installed a fresh copy of LMDE(2),— hoping to run Epson Perfection V500 scanner and Canon DPP using WINE . Neither of these worked out . I replaced the LMDE(2) with a regular dist. of MINT 17.3 — and, using WINE plus the PlayonLinux WINE-front end — I got closer — but no Cigar . My guess the usual trouble — a non supported Window call.

My last effort then was to install a Win8.1 OEM — and of course this reformatted the disk as NTFS . the Win8.1 OEM failed as I couldn’t get the proper support for the monitor installed . I had started with an HP 1440×900 which my wife discarded — and which works perfect in Linux — but the Win8.1 OEM did not offer the 1440×900 resolution as an option . So,— I went and bought a nice Samsung 1920×1080 monitor — which is basically the standard monitor these days — and the Win8.1 OEM didn’t offer that resolution for that monitor either. A messed up match on resolution would be totally unacceptable for the Canon DPP application,—

probably I should not have bought the OEM dist. dunno but this whole Win mess feels a lot like throwing good money after bad.

so, I went back to re-install LMDE(2)

however: the LMDE(2) installer doesn’t partition the disk automatically like the std. dist. does and left me looking at the partition screen feeling pretty dumb ( and needing to learn how to partition a disk )

I’ve since re-loaded the main Dist. of MINT 17.3 — which is running great — but leaves me with a bad feeling about Windows apps,—

I now have one Windows system running — my wife’s Win7 — and — the MSFT/maintenace process could knock that one out — just as it did mine . which would leave one critical program,— that being Turbotax.

I’ll try Turbotax under WINE today. If that works I think I can live with work-arounds on the other two .

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by srq2625 » Fri Feb 12, 2016 7:43 am

This is one of the most religious questions in the Linux world. Given (n) responders, you are likely to get at least (n+1) answers. So, let me add mine to the mess:

Considerations:

• Is this a laptop or desktop computer?
• If a desktop, there will be much less need for hibernation which, in turn, greatly decreases the need for a swap partition/file.
• Will you want to hibernate the computer anyway? No — see previous
• If a laptop and you want to hibernate, then a swap partition/file will be required
• If you don’t want to hibernate then the amount of installed RAM enters into the question of whether a swap partition/file is needed. The more installed RAM on the computer, the less the need for swap. I have 16GB installed in my desktop computer and when I did install with a /swap partition I NEVER made use of the /swap. On an older laptop with just 2GB, I have, once in a great while, needed the /swap.
• The use to which you will be putting the computer. Things like editing of video/audio/photos require much more RAM resources and may cause computer to go looking for swap. If you don’t do these things, the need for swap is greatly reduced. I’ve two computers with 8GB or more RAM on which I do photo editing and I’ve never needed swap; on my last re-install (when I moved to LM), I decided to skip the /swap completely and have yet to have a problem.

Given the stated desire to dual-boot with Windows (the version of Windows, as was pointed out above, does impact on things):

• If Windows 7 (or later), first partition of approx. 100MB, else . skip this
• Windows install partition — at least 50GB, better if at least 100GB as Windows is space hungry and more so as one moves from Win7 to Win8 to Win10
• /swap — if desired (see above)
• / (also, sometimes mistakenly called the «root» partition) this is where the Linux system is installed. LM can be installed in something under 9GB (IIRC), but it’s happiest if you give it some breathing room. I typically give it at least 20GB — space is cheap and undersizing this partition leads to all kinds of headaches.
• If, as a result of the above decisions, you still have only 3 partitions defined . you can either create a partition for your personal data or for another Linux distro or just leave it unallocated for later use.

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