[Mageia-discuss] Rearranging partitions

[Morgan Leijström]

fredagen den 22 juli 2011 15.18.48 skrev  TJ:
> On 07/22/2011 07:03 AM, andre999 wrote:
> > TJ a écrit :

> > One thing I do is define a number of other partitions than /home for
> > various files that would otherwise go into /home.
> > Like that you can keep a relatively small /home.

Also it may be a good idea to encrypt /home.
(easy just set a check mark when you create it in diskdrake, and at each boot 
you will be asked for key)

.. and all large not sensitive data in another partition to avoid unecessary 
CPU load
(.iso files, video, photos, virtual disk file for virtual machine...)

Mount it under /mnt or for example /home/you/nonencrypted

> Sda is quite a bit smaller than sdb, and also contains a 48GB Windows XP
> partition which I'd rather leave alone for the time being. The Mandriva
> and Mageia system partitions are both 12GB. The Mandriva system
> partition has 5.6 GB of open space, and the Mageia partition shouldn't
> be quite that full. Sda7 is 88GB, while sdb6 is 215GB. Sdb6 currently
> has 96 GB on it, but if I do some much-needed housekeeping I could
> reduce that to fit on sda7 with room to spare. The external drive is
> usb2, and 160GB.
> 
> TJ

Read up on LVM
The last years i have set up all familys systems using LVM
It works like this: one or several physical partitions from one or more drives 
are collected into one pool.
Then from that pool you create the partitions you need.
Now comes the big idea: those virtual partitions can easily be resized!
You can even increase mounted paritions on a runing system using diskdrake!
I have done so several times.

For shrinking partitions you need to unmount them, easiest is to boot from a 
live CD/USB.  (well sometimes i have shrunk a mounted partition but i do not 
understand when it it possible and when not...)

So start out with making relatively small partitions and later increase the 
one that need be increased.

The partitions you can not have in LVM is of course the one to boot windows, 
and you also need to have a /boot of 200 MB that can hold grub data and 
booting kernel and a few alternative.

Warning: In diskdrake you can set up encrypted LVM (check mark for encryptopn 
when you make a partition to go into LVM) but not edit it.  Encrypt the 
virtual partition you create from the LVM instead.

The other big advantage of LVM is snapshots.
But i think you need to use command line to handle them.

google!