[GLLUG] Hard Disk Partitions

[Dpk]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 08:48:38PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:

   "Chick Tower" <c.tower@express56.com> writes:
   
   > I'm a Linux newbie.  I haven't even installed any Linux distro yet, although
   > I've been doing a lot of reading.  One thing I just read was a Smart
   > Computing article about setting up a hard disk for multiple OSs, which said
   > there can be at most four active partitions or three active and one
   > extended.
   
   This is true.  The extended partition can contain several
   partitions, though.
   
   > I've seen several recommendations for partitioning a Linux
   > system, and they frequently have more than four partitions.
   
   For server systems, I generally agree with those recommendations.
   But for my own desktop, I generally use just two partitions, one of
   which is for swap.  The main benefit to multiple partitions is that
   if one of them fills up then the others still work fine, but on a
   desktop you're not going to get, say, giant amounts of email or
   huge logs without noticing.

[snip]   

I totally agree with Ben here.  I would further say you can get away
with one partition for Linux and use a swap file instead of a swap
partition on a desktop system.  Servers are another story. While swap
files are not as good (performance, etc.) as partitions, most modern
day systems are not going to swap much.

For me, it offers some flexibility as I can change the size of the
file any given day to adjust useable disk space.

Dennis