El Potro
July 26th, 2012, 08:50 PM
Hello everyone,
I've been reading, asking, and trying to find the most suitable partitioning scheme for my multi booting 2 TB hdd, and probably this is the definitive one (or close). I want to hear your opinions, and I have some questions also. Now let's take a look:
N° type label FS Size
|--sda1 primary grub2 ext4 32 MB
|--sda2 primary swap 2 GB
|--sda3 logical distros 400 GB
| |
| | N° label FS Size
| |--sda5-----> OpenSUSE ext4 5 GB
| |--sda6-----> FreeBSD 5 GB
|
| N° type label FS Size
|--sda4 primary LVM lvm 1536 GB
|
| N° LV name FS Size Mount point
|----1 home ext4 1300 GB /home
|--- 2 ubuntu ext4 25 GB /
|--- 3 debian ext4 10 GB /
|----4 fedora ext4 10 GB /
|----5 mint ext4 10 GB /
Notes:
1. GRUB2 has its own partition, that will be updated from inside Ubuntu with the following command: grub-mkconfig –o /media/btldr/boot/
2. Each distribution will keep it's own native bootloader in it's own partition just in case. Anyway GRUB2 is going to do all the work. If there's a problem, I can chainload to the selected partition (I'm thinking of the distributions that are going to be inside sda3).
3. Unfortunately I won't be using GPT at all because it seems it is not completely supported yet by all distros, and I don't want to struggle so much as long as I can avoid it.
4. Home partition is going to be shared among all distributions using different user folders.
5. I'm very concerned about resizing partitions and the physical volume of LVM. I placed the "distros" partition (/dev/sda3) outside LVM because there are some distributions or systems such as FreeBSD that doesn't support it, or doesn't support it easily (example: OpenSUSE). I want to be able to free space from /dev/sda3 and resize the logical partition and give that extra, freed space to /dev/sda4 (the LVM physical volume) so I can extend the LVM volume group and therefore the logical volume home.
6. All sizes are approximate.
Questions:
1. Will this procedure allow me to extend /dev/sda4 whenever I want?
2. Is it better to place the logical partition (distros) in sda4 (at the bottom of the disk) and the LVM partition before, in sda3? I guess not, that it is simpler to extend the LVM partition in the scheme I designed, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
3. What is the best way to create the logical volumes in LVM? I heard something about contiguous and non-contiguous logical volumes.
4. What is the best order of logical volumes I should follow or choose?
My idea is to extend the home partition if I need so. So I didn't give the whole capacity to LVM in the beginning because it is hard to shrink, so I'll be giving it more capacity, extending it gradually if I see I need it.
Any other ideas, advices or suggestions will be hugely appreciated too.
Thank you
PS: Sorry for possible mistakes, I hope I explained it all clearly.
I've been reading, asking, and trying to find the most suitable partitioning scheme for my multi booting 2 TB hdd, and probably this is the definitive one (or close). I want to hear your opinions, and I have some questions also. Now let's take a look:
N° type label FS Size
|--sda1 primary grub2 ext4 32 MB
|--sda2 primary swap 2 GB
|--sda3 logical distros 400 GB
| |
| | N° label FS Size
| |--sda5-----> OpenSUSE ext4 5 GB
| |--sda6-----> FreeBSD 5 GB
|
| N° type label FS Size
|--sda4 primary LVM lvm 1536 GB
|
| N° LV name FS Size Mount point
|----1 home ext4 1300 GB /home
|--- 2 ubuntu ext4 25 GB /
|--- 3 debian ext4 10 GB /
|----4 fedora ext4 10 GB /
|----5 mint ext4 10 GB /
Notes:
1. GRUB2 has its own partition, that will be updated from inside Ubuntu with the following command: grub-mkconfig –o /media/btldr/boot/
2. Each distribution will keep it's own native bootloader in it's own partition just in case. Anyway GRUB2 is going to do all the work. If there's a problem, I can chainload to the selected partition (I'm thinking of the distributions that are going to be inside sda3).
3. Unfortunately I won't be using GPT at all because it seems it is not completely supported yet by all distros, and I don't want to struggle so much as long as I can avoid it.
4. Home partition is going to be shared among all distributions using different user folders.
5. I'm very concerned about resizing partitions and the physical volume of LVM. I placed the "distros" partition (/dev/sda3) outside LVM because there are some distributions or systems such as FreeBSD that doesn't support it, or doesn't support it easily (example: OpenSUSE). I want to be able to free space from /dev/sda3 and resize the logical partition and give that extra, freed space to /dev/sda4 (the LVM physical volume) so I can extend the LVM volume group and therefore the logical volume home.
6. All sizes are approximate.
Questions:
1. Will this procedure allow me to extend /dev/sda4 whenever I want?
2. Is it better to place the logical partition (distros) in sda4 (at the bottom of the disk) and the LVM partition before, in sda3? I guess not, that it is simpler to extend the LVM partition in the scheme I designed, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
3. What is the best way to create the logical volumes in LVM? I heard something about contiguous and non-contiguous logical volumes.
4. What is the best order of logical volumes I should follow or choose?
My idea is to extend the home partition if I need so. So I didn't give the whole capacity to LVM in the beginning because it is hard to shrink, so I'll be giving it more capacity, extending it gradually if I see I need it.
Any other ideas, advices or suggestions will be hugely appreciated too.
Thank you
PS: Sorry for possible mistakes, I hope I explained it all clearly.