reinstalling and using manual partitions

**Jguy** · December 12th, 2009

Hi,

I am currently in the process of reinstalling Ubuntu 9.04 x64 and wanted to split my /home directory off of my / partition before the OS installs and I have to go through the trouble of doing it manually. I just want to make sure that my partitions will work when the system comes online, and if I'm forgetting anything.

Here are my disks:

/dev/sda - 150GB
/dev/sdb - 500GB
/dev/sdc - 164.6GB (my old 9.10 install reported this disk as having many bad sectors)
/dev/sdd - 500GB
/dev/sde - 640GB (currently an external hard drive, don't want to install here. XD)

And I have the following going in the partition editor of the Ubuntu installer:

/ as ext4 using 120GB mounted as /dev/sda1
swap using 8GB mounted as /dev/sda2
/boot as ext3 using 150MB mounted as /dev/sda3 (can I use ext4 for the boot partition?)
/home as ext4 using 500GB mounted as /dev/sdb1

My main question is:

Do I really need to specify a mount point for /tmp, /usr, /var, /srv, /opt and /usr/local if / is already to be installed in a 120GB partition?

Thanks for any answers you can provide.

**audiomick** · December 12th, 2009

The prevailing advice is that if you are not doing anything out of the ordinary, you do not need to separate more than / and /home. For a modern machine with lots of RAM, a swap is, I believe, not strictly necessary, but is strongly suggested. For one thing, you need a swap that is as big as you RAM in order for the suspend / hibernate functions to work.

As far as / goes, mine has only got 6GB in it, and that after three updates and installing anything that caught my attention for the last 2 years. A fresh install I did recently only had about 2.7GB in there.

The common consensus seems to be:

/ 10 - 15 GB
swap a bit bigger than your RAM
/home the rest.

Given that you have so many discs, put the / , /home and swap on one. Format the others to a linux file system, and choose a mount point for them during the installation. I believe you have the option to do this.

**presence1960** · December 12th, 2009

Originally Posted by audiomick

The prevailing advice is that if you are not doing anything out of the ordinary, you do not need to separate more than / and /home. For a modern machine with lots of RAM, a swap is, I believe, not strictly necessary, but is strongly suggested. For one thing, you need a swap that is as big as you RAM in order for the suspend / hibernate functions to work.

As far as / goes, mine has only got 6GB in it, and that after three updates and installing anything that caught my attention for the last 2 years. A fresh install I did recently only had about 2.7GB in there.

The common consensus seems to be:

/ 10 - 15 GB
swap a bit bigger than your RAM
/home the rest.

Given that you have so many discs, put the / , /home and swap on one. Format the others to a linux file system, and choose a mount point for them during the installation. I believe you have the option to do this.

when you select the manual option of the install process you are going to have to select each partition (/, /home, /boot) and click Edit. Then you will select Use as (filesystem) & from the mount point drop down box select the appropriate mountpoint for each partition, i.e. / for root partition, /home for home partition and /boot for boot partition. For swap highlight the swap partition and make sure use as is set to linux-swap. If you already have data on the newly created /home DO NOT TICK the format box as you will wipe it! Then proceed with the install.

If you do not specify mountpoint for root the install will not continue. If you do not specify mount points for /home & /boot they will not be mounted when you boot after the install, if you can even boot into Ubuntu at all since your boot files are in /boot

The others you can leave in /. Just make it big enough (10-20 GB)

**oldfred** · December 12th, 2009

I am not sure why you even want a separate /boot nowadays. In the old days when linux was primarily a server everything was a different partition and each was sized depending on what applications the server was runing. It made it a little easier to monitor if some partition was filling up.

Now with large hard drives there is little reason for all the partitions. I hear the reasons for a separate /home and I just did that on my new install of Karmic. My install for the last 3 years was just root & home with a NTFS shared partition for some windows stuff. I also now created a /data partition and the vast majority of my data is in the data partition. My /home only has some config info and a little else. I also noted that I did not want to copy all my old /home as it also had 3 years of stuff that was not all current.

Also if you elect to install some other Linux, they may require a separate boot but you cannot share a boot partition with other linux.