which format should i make my drive??

[vorney]

hi i'm going to partition my hard drive which format should i choose? and how much space should i allocate? i 5gb enough?

[dylunio]

I take this is for a new Linux install?

You should make one partition about 512MB - 1024MB in size, this will act as your SWAP partition, I think this is 'formated' SWAP.

For the rest of the space (4-5GB should be enough, if you don't install every app available) you can format it with a veriaty of formats, the two most popular being ext2, and ext3, which are two good filesystems, ext3 is better than ext2 since it contains journaling.
The format I use is Reiser, which is a journaling filesystem (it was built from the ground up as journaling, while ext3 was journaling added to ext3).
Other two poplare formats are, XFS and JFS, and in development is Reiser4.

I personnaly would go for either Reiser or Ext3 filesystem formats.

dylunio

[Stormblazer]

The installer for your distro should have a built-in formating thing in the installer, so use that. It's generally a bad idea to format Linux partitions with non-Linux tools like partition magic. Just my advice.

[tfk]

I'd prefer Reiser over ext3 for a root partition, since it contains many small files. For a backup partition with very large files, ext3 has the better performance.

[Fallen Angel]

You can format it with Reiserfs or ext3, they both contain journaling.