hard drive partitions

[David A. Sinck]

\_ SMTP quoth George Toft on 8/8/2001 08:00 as having spake thusly:
\_
\_ Hi Rick,
\_ 
\_ With one big partition, you have to back up and restore if you change
\_ Linux distros or reinstall from scratch.  With a separate /usr/local
\_ and /home partitions, you can maintain your software installed and
\_ change the distro and everything still works.  I did this as I switched
\_ from Red Hat to Caldera to Debian to SuSE, which requires reformatting
\_ the partitions.

Besides that benefit, the smaller the partition slice, the smaller the
number of inode traversals needed to get to the real bits of the
file.  I don't have the number handy, but IIRC, there's a layer of
indirection around the 2G mark on standard parameters.   

On a related note, have "we" finally overcome the 16 partition limit?
Like with a 75G disk, could I conceivably make 75 1G partitions (give
or take a few bytes).  Think of the fun...you could have a partion a
dir for the first 2-3 layers of your / tree.  

Oh, and speaking from experience, running fsck on a 9G / partition (I
did *not* set it up) sucks eggs.  Big nasty rotten eggs.  And momma
bird is there pecking your eyes out while you do it too.  Then the
trifids come over because of the noise, and they make it so dark that
you are likely to be eaten by a grue.  30+m to fsck that partition.  

David