Partition sizes.

[mooglekexin]

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Hi,

This is gonna be my first ever linux install, suse 9.3 pro and its gonna be dual booting with win XP pro.
I have a 160GB hard drive and i was wondering about partitions... specifiacally recommended sizes for each one and also how many hou recommend.
I need xp for world of warcraft.
I have lots of music, images and video files too.
Em... linux will be my primary OS when i drag myself away from WoW

Sorry for my noobishness

[Cabhan]

No worries, partitions are a tough concept.

The most common partitioning scheme involves 3 partitions for Linux:

/
/boot
swap

Some people like to separate their /home from the rest of it, so they can move between distros easier. Personally, I use the above scheme.

The /boot partition should be fairly small. Mine is only 100 MB. It basically holds kernel images and very little else.

The swap is usually either the same size as your RAM or twice the size of your RAM.

And stick everything else into /.

Now then, if you're gonna be using servers or something, that changes everything. Mail / Web servers go into /var, so you would want that to be bigger. I'm told that game servers go into /opt, so you'd assign that a large partition.

But for a basic partitioning scheme, this should do you.

[mechmaster]

first you need a partitioning program, i like qtparted, it comes with knoppix. For XP make it however large you think you will need depending on the usage of it. i.e. larger if you save music or pictures alot. You also need a linux swap. Make it about half the linux partition. Also make the linux partition about however large you will think you will need a minumum of 3gbs for the install. To format the linux parition, in the program you have to choose a filesystem, i would choose reiser or ext3 so that it is seen as a linux partition. To resize your win partition, choose resize, and it will resize it leaving a blank partition, and form there you can create a linux and swap partition, there is a swap option when you are setting up the partition. Only Qtparted with knoppix 3.9 will support NTFS or windows XP. Qtparted for me is a favorite but i think there are others out there.

Hope this helps

-mechmaster

[mooglekexin]

Excellent guys, thanks.

I just downloaded partitionmagic.

Its just gonna be a normal-non-server using thing.

Hoho! *rubs hands with glee*

[mechmaster]

no problem

[oz]

It all depends on what my plans are with the distro and partitions, but usually I go with something similar to this:

/ (about 5 or 6 gigs)
swap (about 512 megs)
/home (about 5 or 6 gigs)