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Re: Installing



On Fri, Dec 25, 1998 at 05:54:29PM +0000, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> > Please explain how having several partitions helps in this situation.
> 
> When you already have several partitions, you can usually move things off
> of one of them (which is not root and can be umounted at run time) into a
> tar.gz file or to another system over a network, and then put whatever fs
> you need on it (including non-Linux). 

Do you find you need this often?

> imho the fact that there is more than one way to do things is manna and
> one should not renounce this advantage by limiting the number of choices
> from start.

Hear, hear. However,

> I use 5 partitions even on the smallest disks I have (120MB). Also, if a
> partition develops an un-recoverable error then all the remaining
> partitions are unaffected, and no special tools are required to recover
> them. 

on small disks especially, I find seperate partitions to be a
real pain. If you don't know exactly what you're going to put
on the disk in advance, a small (tens on MB) difference in
layout to the wrong side means the sort of gymnastics that come
close to reinstallation.

There most definitely is more than one way to do it, but there
is also more than one reason to be doing it. If your users are
going to be doing unexpected things on the machines (as users
are wont to do) you simply cannot tell in advance how much /opt
needs, and how much to put in /usr/local.

> Then there is image backup. An umounted partition can be backed up as a
> single file, regardless of its fs (i.e. even if the Linux can't really
> mount it) (this is especially good for non-Linux legacy partitions ;).
> Simply run the partition through gzip or bzip and put it somewhere. btw
> this won't work if the partition to be backed up is >= 2G and the target
> place is on an ext2 fs.

Nice, but. But you could have tgzed the files, not the disk,
and then get
 - the ability to access a random file in the archive
 - the ability to open the archive on a different disk,
   or a different filesystem, or a differently sized partition

What's the advantage of dumping a phyisical disk? Probably a
bit faster, and the ability to backup those legacy partitions,
but these partitions are either readable by linux - in which
case I could tgz the files - or not, in which case they don't
fit our case anyway (a linux box whose partitioning is under
debate).

> And last, there is the two root system.
[...]
> perhaps by recopying hda into it. The root partition can be as small as
> 100MB for a large system. On a 4G + 2G system you waste only 100MB like
> this (~1.8%).

Clever, neat, and laudable. But this is a special case.

I find physical disk errors to be quite rare nowadays. Much rarer,
for instance, than some poor soul asking for help after a wrong
partition layout.
On servers, I go for multi-partition. On _most_ small systems, I
believe the advantages of single partitioning win.

#ifdef FLAME
BTW: however did you people label this "the redmond way"!? the
redmond way is to give every partition its own root, with no
way of migrating software packages from one disk to the other
(regedit32, anyone?), AND having the names of each root change
after they are installed (ever had your D: pushed to be E: after
adding a second disk?), AND not even having symbolic links to
save you (oh thanks Bill, I heard you're delaying NT5^H2000 to
come up with the next century's fs technology - only why should
incorporating it take 25 years from its invention?)
#endif
--
believing is seeing
gaal@forum2.org
http://www.forum2.org/gaal/