Partitioning Linux on 2 Hard Drives

[TboneMarching]

To anyone who can help,
I'm fairy new at Linux (althought I've been meaning to get into it for quite some time now). I threw together a computer from spare parts that were around the house and now I have a question about installation (The flavor is RedHat 7.2). The two hard drives I have for that computer are a WD 1.6 GB and a Seagate 4.5 GB. How should I partition Linux over the two drives so that it completely fills them up and functions in the best possible way? Any help at all would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[cleverhandle]

Well, the easy no-hassle way would be to ditch the little drive and just use a swap and root partition on the big drive - you'll have plenty of other stuff to figure out besides disks and partitions. A bit more advanced would be to put the swap partition on the little drive and the root partition on the big drive. Assuming the disks are on separate channels, that will give you better swap performance, which may or may not be important depending on how much physical RAM you have. You could also create a /home partition on the big drive along with the root (/) partition - that way, any documents in your personal directory can easily be saved between OS installations. I honestly wouldn't get any more complicated than that just starting out - as you learn more, you'll probably end up reinstalling or trying different distros several times, and you'll figure out the partition scheme that suits you best. Better to just jump in and get started than spend time figuring out optimal partition plans that give you little real benefit.

 

[TboneMarching]

Okay, thanks alot for the help

 

[Gungnir]

I have a related problem. I already installed e-smith (RH 7.0 based) on a system with 2 scsi drives. I would like to remove the drive with the boot info and move it all to the 34g drive so I can implement software scsi1 with another identical drive.
Anyone know how to do this safely?
/dev/sdb2 34G 555M 31G 2% /
/dev/sda1 15M 5.8M 8.6M 40% /boot

 

[cleverhandle]

No problem, TBone.

Gungnir, that should be pretty easy to do. You should just be able to copy the current /boot stuff to a temporary directory, unmount the boot partition, and copy the temp directory into /boot. Then you'll need to remove the /boot line from your fstab, edit /etc/lilo.conf to point to the new kernel location, and rerun lilo. I'm not sure how the system.map file (usually in /boot) is involved here - I think it's generated by compiling the kernel, and might need updating if you move the /boot partition, but I'm not sure. It would be good to have a boot floppy just in case. You also might run into the >1024 cylinder problem, but perhaps that's a thing of the past now.