On Saturday 08 September 2007 01:45, Mike McMullin wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-08-09 at 00:49 -0400, Bob S wrote:
> > Hello SuSE people,
> >
> > This is especially for you guys/gals that run 3or 4 os's on a big hard
> > drive. How do you handle the primary and extended partitions?
> >
> > A while back I purchased a 250 GB Sata drive, intending to install
> > different os's and or versions of SuSE. I installed 10.2 on my shiny new
> > drive but I stupidly partitioned 3 primaries,  /,  /swap, and /home, and
> > used the fourth primary for the extended partition. Dumb move - Out of
> > partitions with about 150GB of free space. (I run 10.0 on another small
> > IDE drive)
>
Mike,thanks for replying. You have answered some of my nagging questions about 
usability.

>   I've got a big HD on my main system, and I'm running 5.  Two Os's on
> one one hd and three are on the big drive.  The one with three
> partitions I set up as such: hdb1=swap,
> hdb2=/ for 10.1, hdb3=/home for 10.1, then there is an extended
> partition where hdb5=/ for 10.2, hdb6=/home for 10.2, hdb7=/ for
> LinuxXP.  I do have on hda2 a swap partition, on hda1 Windows XP, on
> hda3 Ubuntu root, and on hda4 Ubuntu Home.

That explains quite a bit.
>
> > Now, I guess I could move my /home and /swap into the extended partition
> > to free up two primary partitions. Hopefully that would give me access to
> > the rest of the unused space on the drive. I always liked having my /home
> > on it's own partition to guard it from mishap.  Now, here are some of my
> > questions:
> >
> > Is the /home as safe residing in the extended partition? I could never
> > delete or change the extended partition because they would wipe out /home
> > - right?
>
>   Yes to both, almost.  You could always backup your /home partition to
> move it to a new hard drive.  Strategies for this have been discussed ad
> nauseum on this list over the past 18 or so months.

Yeah, I guess I could do  that. Move it inside the extended partition or 
another drive, but then I couldn't use that empty primary because it would be 
isolated between the /swap and the extended partition and not be able to 
access the free space left on the disk behind the extended partition as Felix 
explained. Wonderful !  What dumbness in the original partitioning scheme I 
made.
>
> > Is it a good idea to have /swap on the extended partition? Do you use the
> > same /swap for all of the os's? (e.g. like my /swap for 10.0 on the IDE
> > drive?)
>
>   I have my swap in a primary partition on any drive that I have a swap
> on, and I have the 4 Linux's use the swap partition on hdb.  I'm keeping
> the one on hda there in case I remove my hdb.  I'll tweak Ubuntu to use
> it using a live cd to make the edit to fstab.

OK, so I really only need one /swap for 10.0, 10.2, and the future 10.3, 
right?
>
> > How do you manage to run 3 or 4 os variants on just 4 primary partitions?
>
>   I give my heavy lifting/everyday Linux the primary partitions and use
> the extended partition for checking out other releases/distros.

Understood and appreciative of your strategy. 
>
> > Love to hear your individual strategies.
> >

 Bob S.
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