It's pretty much a fact what Amit has said that most people only create
two partitions. That's the way I started out. It makes sense to first do
a very simple installation to find out how things work. Once your
confident enough, you should format and reinstall. Of course, backup
whatever you have done in that short time.
I was kinda forced into reinstalling cause some wise guy in the office
kept switching off the machine without a proper shutdown. It finally came
to a point where the system would no keep running a fsck on every boot,
and I could not unmount properly.
I tarred/gzipped all files that I had changed, and ftp'ed the file to
another machine. Then deleted the / and swap partns and reinstalled.
I now have partitions for:
/, /boot, /home, /tmp, /usr, /usr/src, /var
Works pretty well, and I can keep certain partitions read only until I
actually have to change files there.
Finally, I restored my backups. That's where my next problem started.
I unknowingly restored my old fstab, so the next time I booted, I couldn't
do anything because my partition table did not reflect what was entered
into fstab. I could not change fstab because / was mounted read only, and
I couldn't remount it because the partition entries in fstab did not match
the partition table.
I could not figure out any solution after two days, and decided to
reinstall again. This time I restored correctly.
I have never lost any information because I always take backups and keep
them in varied locations that are really far apart.
Hope my experience will help anyone who wants to set up a new system.
Keep it simple to start with, get confident and then reinstall. Then
recompile the kernel.
Philip
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