On Sat, 4 Jan 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> I'd like to install Debian Linux into various partitions on 2 harddisks.
> hdb holds 400 MB, and hdc around 1.1 GB.

You bet.  If possible, stick to hda and hdc.  I saw a 10 to 1 performance
improvement in Win95 ScanDisk when I moved my second 1.2G Western Digital
to secondary master from primary slave (primary master is an identical 1.2
WD).  But yes, NOTHING wrong with splitting across two drives.  Try to
split them intelligently for best performance.  Here's some of my thoughts
on partitioning: when you are reading data, you want it now.  /home and
/usr should not be on the same disk (launching emacs on a file will be
reading both the executable and the file).  /var probably should be on a
different disk than /usr (same as /home?) because daemons want to write to
their log file as they are starting up, etc.  

Here's a df on my server:

Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda1              19485   10253     8226     55%   /
/dev/hda2             223494  146781    65172     69%   /usr
/dev/hdc3             198123   11279   176613      6%   /var
/dev/hdc4             288354     542   272919      0%   /tmp
/dev/hda3             560060    5788   525343      1%   /nfs
/dev/hdb1            2990073 2038838   796610     72%   /server

/dev/hdc2 is a 120M swap.  /nfs holds /home and /var/spool/mail, you'll
see why in a minute.

Here's a df on my workstation:

Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda3              39039    7855    29168     21%   /
/dev/hda4             577609  307494   240279     56%   /usr
/dev/hdc3              99539    7646    86753      8%   /var
/dev/hdc4             201043      37   190624      0%   /tmp
templinux:/nfs        560060    5789   525342      1%   /nfs

hda1 is 200M FAT (Win95 OS).  hda2 is 400M NTFS (WinNTW 4.0).  hdc1 is
800M FAT (Common 95/NT apps).  hdc2 is 120M swap.  

On both machines, /home is a symlink to /nfs/home, and /var/spool/mail is
a symlink to /nfs/spool/mail, allowing easy NFS mounting of user files
with only one NFS mount (and one partition!).

> Finally, as far as I know, / doesn't have to be a primary partition. But are
> there any advantages to designating it as primary?

I try to make every partition a primary, if possible (keep in mind that
Linux can have four primaries, unlike DOS).  I've seen a few (albeit older
and non-Debian) Linux fdisk's choke on the whole extended/logical deal.

  --Pete
_______________________________________________________________
Peter J. Templin, Jr.                   Client Services Analyst
Computer & Communication Services       tel: (717) 524-1590
Bucknell University                     [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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