Fedora 7 install: DISK failure consideration

[David Timms]

Sebastian Gurovich wrote:
> I have a hard disk with a WinXP NTFS physical partition and wish to add
> Fedora 7 to have a dual boot system
> but am not sure what to do for partitioning.
> Thinking of 6 partitions in total.
> 
> (1) NTFS for windows
> (2) "/boot" for boot loader
> (3) "/home"
> (4) "/"
> (5) swap
> (6) /tmp
> 
> One option, AFAIK is to create at least 2 EXT3 partitions. One for the 
> /boot
> and the other for the rest. Then
> using LVM I could create logical partitions (volumes) for "/home",  "/" and
> "/tmp", BUT, I know the disk will have problems in the future due to age,
> wear and accidental bumps etc. I am going to take backups but the question
> is: am I better off first to create many different physical partitions for
> the F7 installation or should I just create two physical partitions and use
> LVM to create many logical volumes out of the one physical volume?
> 
> That is,
> 
> Should I create 2 physical partitions with Partition Magic, for (1) and for
> (2),(3),(4),(5) and then use LVM for (2),(3),(4),(5)
You could keep it in the free software family, and use gparted {live cd} 
if you dont already have a linux installed.

> (1) \boot
> (2) logVol00 ("/home")
> (3) logVol01 ("/")
> (4) logVol02 (swap)
> (5) logVol03 ("/tmp")
> 
> OR
> 
> Should I FIRST create five PHYSICAL partitions with Partition Magic (both
> primary and extended) and then use LVM to end up with :
> 
> (1) \boot
> (2) logVol00 (/home)
> (3) logVol01 (/)
> (4) logVol02 (swap)
> (5) logVol03 (/tmp)
> 
> If i go with the 2nd option and leave extra free space in logVol00,logVol01
> and logVol03  can I later take space from "/home ",  /"tmp" or swap and
> redistribute it to "/" and vice-versa using LVM?
There is some catches to actually doing that - i'm dont know how to do 
that without needing to back up your lvm item, delete, recreate, restore.

> Maybe I can´t create 5 physical partitions and Partition Magics extended
> partition scheme is like LVM´s logical partition scheme and so the end
> result is similar or am I missing something here?

Re LVM: IMHO it will make life more difficult if you have disk faults-> 
avoid it.
I am assuming you are space constrained: make /boot say 32MB. {I've 
never had it using more than about 16MB, the updates system only keeps 
two kernels in the boot partition these days}.

If you have 512MB ram, swap could be 512MB as well, If you have more 
RAM, you might not need as much swap.

I wouldn't bother about a /tmp partition, instead distribute the space 
between / and /home. This might make / susceptible to disk full 
situations, but in my experience, this hasn't stopped the machine 
working, just from being able to save ! {starting an X session as root 
seems to need some space on / }. Also, some apps {firefox} download the 
/tmp, then move a file when finished. Instead of this being a move 
within a partition having a separate /tmp means it becomes a copy/delete 
{and takes much longer}.

eg: usage of / on my PC - 5.7GB, but I am storing some data within that 
size (because I ran out of space elsewhere), and I have 1206 rpm 
packages installed. Another machine has / usage of 4.2GB. I quite often 
make vmware virtual machines with 4GB virtual disk {32MB /boot, 512MB 
swap, / as the rest. They generally have 2GB free after install. I add a 
separate virtual disk if I need more space for /home}. If you tried to 
do an install everything, you would need quite a huge / {/usr}, but I 
don't have real stats about that.

DaveT.