----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Salts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 1999 5:36 PM
Subject: Disk full
> John,
>
> Thanks for your replies.
>
> Let me see if I understand this correctly: You are saying that I should
> use fdisk for partitioning it and select '/' as the mount point for that
> partition in the install afterwards.
>
Well, you would be advised to listen to anything that anyone else in this
list suggests as well. I've only been running Linux since January, and that
only on my "work" machine. :-) OTOH, I've screwed up the system badly enough
(trying to upgrade Mandrake 5.3 to RedHat 6 <G>) that I've had to
reinstall... also nuked my entire home directory on my work machine by
accident... no great loss, just some headaches. :-)
Now, if this is going to be the ONLY drive in the system, I would DEFINATELY
create a "swap drive" of between 50 - 100 megs, then make ONE partition
(I've read how some people will put /home on a different partition. YMMV,
but I"ve not had anything I couldn't recover from in my "/home" directory so
no big loss wiping the drive and reinstalling.) and mount it as /
>
> Is '/' the only item I should use as a mount for now and should I
partition
> the _whole_drive with this or only a certain amount of MB's. If only some
> MB's what would be a recommended size to start with?
>
How big is this drive again???? BTW, someone emailed ME suggesting that YOU
use the "workstation" install and just let it handle everything by itself.
>From what I've read in here and the other gentleman said, it will basically
take over and make all the decisions for you. OTOH, if you choose to make a
"custom" install, you are responsible for ALL the decisions. This is your
call. I can't make it for you. A lot depends on how courageous you are and
how familiar you are with partitioning hard drives, etc. FDISK is pretty
much like DOS/Windows FDISK. Neither it nor Disk Druid will format the drive
for you. However, the install script SHOULD format the drive(s) for you. If
it doesn't, you can always boot to a "rescue" disk and mount the drive and
run mke2fs on that drive. This is the command to format a drive using the
Linux Extended File System (Linux Native.) I suggest you read "man mke2fs."
>
> And then after that, do I quit fdisk and use Disk Druid or just continue
> with fidsk, or does it matter what partitioning tool I use?
>
Yes. Quit FDISK. It should put you back to the install, where you can finish
the installation.
>
> Supposing all goes well, and I wonder what else I'll encounter, how many
> partitions would I make and what size should they be? Should they be
> expandable?
>
Well, you will HAVE to have a minimum of two -- the "linux-native" partition
and the swap partition. Other than that, it's up to you. I've heard that
you'll probably want several hundred megs for the /dev tree and probably
several hundred (for sheer storage space, etc) for /home (which includes
/home/ftp and /home/httpd, etc.) In all the installations I've done (3 or 4
now...I'm a REAL "expert" -- NOT! <G>) I've not bothered with anything but
just the root directory and let Linux install on one partition.
I strongly advise you to read the archives on this list and get other
opinions. If this is going to be a physically separate drive from your
Windows stuff, I'd consider making sure you have a backup of your Windows
drive, or at least have all irreplaceable data backed up!
John
