On Sat, 2002-01-12 at 11:59, Phil Mendelsohn wrote: > I'm doing some shuffling of some systems, and I've got a question. > I know *HOW* to partition drives, but frankly I'm finding partitions > to be more of an asset than a liability. > > The reasons I have so far that justify creating a partition are: > > 1 Boot partitions (multiple OSs, or in the case of Alpha, some > need to see a FAT partition with certain BIOS/bootloader > combinations. > > 2 Need for multiple fs. If you *need* a disk of fs <x>, sure. > > 3 Simple "hardware quotas". > > I see no reason to divide the drive otherwise. How about this one: I've decided on Linux, but I'm not sure which distro, or which version I'm going to settle on. I know that I'm going to want to work on the same files in my /home directory, and I'm perfectly willing to dedicate a small part of the disk to an ext2 /boot partition -- but I haven't, yet, decided whether my / partition should be on a ext2, ext3, RAID, or rfs partition, much less whether I should trade off performance vs. safety for striping the /var stuff, which I don't horribly mind losing. Further, I do want to be able to create an on-disk backup of some critical files, then unmount the backup partition -- part of the Safety Through Paranoia program. If you want to have > multiple disks, you can hang them from any mountpoint in that file > system. If one of multiple disks goes down, you can remount/restore > to the same point, whether the drive in question has been partitioned > or not. But if a partitioned drive fails totally, all the partitions > fail. > > It has *not* been my experience that drives fail in such a way as to > render some of them useful, but not others. (Not that it can't > happen, but bad bearings affect all partitions equally.) > > Not from *nix, but I know VMS has had logical volume capability since > forever, and RMS filesystems are *not* partitioned. Does the LVM use > partitioned drives (I'm reading web stuff as I ask...) or do they > spend a lot of energy trying to integrate partitions back into raw > drive space so that they can control the fs structure? > > I just wanted to hear a little discussion on this, 'cause I think I'm > close to developing an opinion that partitioning is silly. > > Thx, > Phil > > -- > "Trying to do something with your life is like > sitting down to eat a moose." --Douglas Wood > _______________________________________________ > Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- ------------------------------------- There's a widow in sleepy Chester Who weeps for her only son; There's a grave on the Pabeng River, A grave that the Burmans shun, And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri Who tells how the work was done. -------------------------------------