[H-GEN] Need help during install, or just after ;)

[Martin Pool]

>On Wed, 10 Jun 1998, Michael wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I just got a brand new 6.4gig hdd installed and i partitioned it as such:
>> 
>> /dev/hdb7	Swap		128M	
>> /dev/hdb8	/		500M	*
>> /dev/hdb9	/home		100M
>> /dev/hdb10	/usr/X11R6	450M
>> /dev/hdb11	/usr	      1000M
>
>Ok, I know this post is for a disk problem but I thought I'd start here.
>There is certain lore with respect to disk partition that is supposed to
>make the disk a little (probably less than measurably) faster.  But there
>are a few things that should be kept in mind. Generally / should be
>"small" because nothing will stop a Unix system in its tracks faster thana
>corrupt / FS.  Unix will generally handle a corrupt anything else in its
>stride, but a corrupt / really makes it cross.  So the lore I mentioned
>above suggests making / small.  So what is "small".  Well zen has 20mb
>while blake has 15mb,  I could prob squeze both down to 10mb.

However, a contrary rule of thumb is that it's good to have lots of 
free space on /, in case e.g. you need to use it while recovering
from some problem.  So, I tend to make them ~100MB (on large disks),
but with mostly free space.

Another nice thing you can do if /var and /tmp are on separate partitions
is mount / and even /usr readonly when you're finished messing around
with them.  (A test-to-destruction method of finding out which 
programs abide by the FSSTND. :)  Another impediment to anybody (including
yourself) damaging the machine.  

>They have seperate partitions for /tmp /usr /var and /home (as well as a
>/var/spool/news).

I'd agree.  Then symlink /tmp to /var/tmp and /usr/tmp as some
silly programs insist on looking there.

>I hope my advice helps next time you come to repartition :)
>If you're like me you wanna sqeeze every last oucnce of speed out of ide

And use a recent kernel: apparently 2.0 and 2.1 are both getting 
faster as time goes on.

--
Martin



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