Partitioning harddrives

Well since nobody else took a stab at this, here goes.....

I would say yes. It is better to keep your essential system files (like C:\winnt)on a separate partition. My Windows company laptop is set up that way and almost every UNIX OS default setup will automaically partition a disk for you and keep certain folders separate.

I don't think backup is terribly difficult if all of your files are on one partition. If you've got Win2K you can just fire up their backup tool and check the folders you want to backup and you're done.

 

Well, I've gone to actually putting all of the Documents and Settings files on another computer, and logging in over the network. The hard drive on my desktop machine could spontaneously combust, and I wouldn't lose any critical files.

Now I just have to set up a third machine to do backups of the server...

 

Are you running a business out of your house or something???

 

Haven't you heard? Bigsoccho.com.

 

i still keep doc and set folder on my client pcs because i don't really need a roaming profile but all the important data which i usually put in my document folder otherwise is on a file server and run a script at start up to map a network drive to those files.

i used to have 2 partitions but now since my client pcs are basically not having anything but system & temp files they all have only one partition.

although many corporates use thrid party backup utilities like veritas, for home users "ntbackup" does what you want to do just fine. fullbackup once a week and then diff backup once a week. that's pretty much enough for me.

 

I'd keep my Program files on a separate and preferably larger partition along with my documents and settings folder.
My information may be a little outdated but when I used to fool around with Linux the /boot partition couldn't reside on a cylinder higher than 1024. I don't know if that limitation still exists with grub (the newer boot loader that seems to be replacing LILO). I don't know if windows has that limitation as well.

I'm sure there's a HOWTO on what you should do and avoid with respect to installing WinXP and Linux on the same machine. I bet they'll tell you to install windows first and then linux and use the linux bootloader to switch between the two.

 

Well, my personal website is running off of a server in my house. I also host two other domains. And I run torrents.huntparkinsider.com there.

Some day, once my wife finishes her MBA, I'll be running the e-commerce server for the business we will be starting.

And, if you think what I've got set up now is overboard, just wait. I've got plans of setting up a VOIP PBX network in my house, so I can have in-house voicemail, extensions, the works. Eventually, I'd like to hook the house mechanical and electrical systems to a computer for control purposes. My TiVo was networked before a recent OS upgrade wiped that out (just have to find the time to reinstall the ethernet drivers), my Xbox is networked, and I have a secured wireless network for our laptop. I have long-term plans to build a MythTV server and network diskless head-end machines at TV locations to provide whole-house unified PVR service.

As for hustling to set up a backup machine - let's just say I lost some critical files (my wife's MBA portfolio - thankfully we were able to recover 99% of it from other people) in a catestrophic mechanical hard drive failure. Then, not two weeks later, my dad's hard drive went into the dumpster. Thankfully, he a) had 2 day old backups of critical files, and b) it wasn't a mechanical failure with the drive like mine was. I was able to copy his old drive over to a new drive, do a repair install of XP and reinstall SP2, and we were pretty much up and running. I think there were a few other corrupt files that required app reinstallation, but overall that was way less painful than my hard drive crash.

 

It doesn't really matter which partition certain files end up on. Just know that Windows, by default, uses your system drive as a swap drive. You want to make sure that either your system drive has a lot of empty space to be used as swap space, or that you manually tell the system to use the app & document drive as the swap drive. Lack of virtual memory space will make a huge difference in performance speed. In fact, the #1 upgrade I suggest for most people is RAM - most machines for sale nowadays have too little RAM. RAM isn't sexy, but processor speed is. Processor speed is overrated - I was running on a PIII 800MHz machine for nearly three years, but because I had nearly a Gig of RAM, I things worked just fine for me.

Be aware that NTFS partitions are (IIRC) unreadable by Linux*. If you want to make files easily accessable, put them on a FAT32 partition. If the files/drive in question won't be shared with Linux, make it NTFS.

* - There is an interesting project on SourceForge to make a NTFS driver for Linux. http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ I have no experience with it, so YMMV.

 

IMHO there is no real performance or data integrity argument in favor of partitioning the HD. I guess the best that can be said is that giving the system its own partition makes defragmentation and control of swap easier. But that last thing can be a double-edged sword as Foos pointed out.

As for having the data on a separate partiton, what's the point. The most common cause of data loss is HD hardware failure and despite the partitioning, it's all one physical drive.

So, if you can, put all data on remote, redundant storage. The second-best solution is a separate storage device in a desktop environment. If you are a laptop user (like me), weekly dumps to a server or external HD are mandantory. Otherwise it's not if but when you loose stuff.

 

It was my understanding that the 2.6 kernel allows mounting of NTFS as read-only. Did I miss something?

BTW, have you seen the Samba 4 feature set? Full Active Directory Domain Controller compatibility!

 

I probably missed something. Still no write capability, tho. And that project I linked too apparently doesn't support it either.

I'd heard that. I'm pretty happy with my PDC right now with Samba 3, but I'll obviously review to see if updating makes sense. I'd really like to get an LDAP system up and running, to provide single sign-on for my network & email. But there are only so many hours in the day to learn this stuff, and right now my LAN has ONE workstation, and two users, so... cost/benefit, you know?

 

Everybody these days seems hung up on processor speed. You can't evaluate a cpu by just looking at clock speed. AMD's naming scheme for their Athlon's illustrates how hung up people are on clock speed and they have to compete by trying to say that a 1.8 Ghz Athlon can compete with a 2.2 GHz by calling it the athlon 2200+

 

With all of that stuff, what kind of broadband is going to your house? A DSL/cable modem sounds a little to wimpy to support all of that.

 

Wow. You're very thorough.

 

NTFS read/write/resizing capabilities is starting to reach maturity in Linux. But to be on the safe side, if one wants to share files between Windows and Linux, make that drive use FAT32.

 

I have Linux and Windows sitting on different harddrives, so partitions weren't an issue. Linux only needs three partitions now-a-days: boot, swap and the main partition. I did try partitioning Windows in the past, but you lose flexibility in the usage of the harddrive space.

BTW, I have NTFS read capability compiled into my 2.6.9 kernel, and I have no issues reading from my NTFS drive. I would consider NTFS read capability fully mature. Write capability is, to my knowledge, still in the beta stage.

 

You don't need NTFS read capability compiled into the 2.6.9 kernel - NTFS read capability has been supported for quite some time. It's the writing part that is not yet mature, at least for data safety sake. In otherwords, you can write to NTFS, but might cause problems.

 

I know there was discussion of this in a different thread, but I couldn't find it.

My workplace has just gone to a VoiP system, running Astericon a dedicated Fedora box. It's fantastic; so much better than our old, traditional multi-line system. Now, I'm not the one who had to configure the whole thing, but I can't imagine using any other system now.

 

A standard residential DSL account does the job. I'd like more up bandwidth - my server is unacceptably slow at serving large files - but it works just fine for web pages and email. The torrent tracker uses surprisingly little bandwidth.

Hell, I don't even have a static IP.

When I start hosting our business website, I'll upgrade to a bigger pipe. Maybe that fiber they are testing in Texas will be mature and rolled out by then.

 

Lose some critical files and watch how complete your backup system becomes.

But, I'm inherently lazy - I hate maintenence routines. That's why I'll be doing the backups via rsync on a cron job. That's what I do at work, and it religiously diffs an entire SMB share twice a day without so much as a "how's your father?". Totally awesome.

 

that was supposed to read Asterick, but I'm sure you figured that out

 

Well, you *could* create a specialized "swap partition" and override Windows by telling it to use 100% of that partition for the swap drive. That would have an advantage - your swap space wouldn't be eaten up by file creep without Windows choosing to notify you. On the other hand - and this may or may not be a disadvantage - Windows no longer automagically manages virtual memory for you.

For example, I have one monolithic C: drive on my desktop machine. I have 1 GB of RAM, and 1.5GB of swap space (and the ability for the system to expand it to 3GB). It is conceivable that I could fill my entire 120GB hard drive with downloaded games from HPI's MLS/USA tracker, and the OS would gladly sacrifice swap space without notifying me.