New TC Install HD Partitioning Question

[antiMS]

The online 'Install Tiny Core Linux' guide discusses hard drive partitioning. Please recommend how you would partition my drive. Here's the situation:
1. I have an older computer (AMD K6-III 450Mhz CPU with 756MB PC-100 RAM) with a 20 GB hard drive. The computer currently has Windows 98 loaded.
2. I want to completely wipe the hard drive and start clean with TC Linux. I do not intend to run Windows on this machine again.
3. I've already moved all files I want to keep onto a CD. So, there's nothing remaining on the drive I need to preserve.
4. I want to install TC and extensions in the recommended Mount/PPR mode.

With that said, I have 3 primary questions:
1. How many partitions would you create on the hard drive?
2. What partitions do you recommend using (i.e. swap, etc.)?
3. How would you divide the 20 GB drive space between the partitions (i.e. size of each partition)?

Thanks!

[Juanito]

You could do something like 1GB boot partition, 2GB swap partition and the rest for data.

If you intend to try out other distros, you might want to make several boot partitions, but they might have to be bigger than 1GB depending on the disto.

[beerstein]

Hi: I played for years with multi boot and I came up with the following:

1. The first partition on a hd I always put a FAT (2GB or so) In case of an emergency I can boot with
a MS-DOS diskette and do some troubleshooting with DOS utils. Althougt FAT 32 is not safe.

2. Then I set up a /boot partition which I later mount as /boot - also with other Linux distros. 1-2 GB is enough.

3. The /swap partition, as a rule of thump should be 2 x RAM. So f.i. if you have 500 MB of RAM, make it 1 GB.

4. Than you make your / root partition for the first Linus distro, here you you use 5GB-10GB, depens on the work you want to do. Burning large iso files needs a lot of space. So you can do the math here.

5. Then you can make several more partitions for later use and leafe them empty. At the end of the hd I always make a 2-3GB FAT partition, which I use as an area of "exchange". Here I can exchange data between NTFS, ext3 and FAT 32.

I like the boot loader grub, but have not played around with the new grub2. I prefer to put the grub into the master boot record, once I install the first Linux distrio on my hd. All subsequent distros I install without a bootloader. Then I adjust the menu,lst according to the new distribution. Because all subsequent distris need a partition to boot from, I select the respective /root partition or some  times the /boot partition. In the later case you must make sure that the kernel files etc. have different names and that the lines in menu.lst point to the respecting name.

I this will help you. 

[aus9]

hi

I am not sure if you are using the net for this pc? Or what size of local files you need to store on this pc?

leaping ahead....each partition causes a loss of free space.

Personally, I would make 2 primary partitions.....as TC is a RAM system.

p1 ext3 17900
p2 swap (balance = about 2048)

[SvOlli]

antiMS,

I'd go for the following partitions:
/(root) 2GB
swap 2GB
/home 16GB

After installing the base, I'd remove /home from /opt/.filetool.lst. That way the backup during shutdown will be rather fast.

P.S.: I had a 1GHz Vortex86 machine with 256MB of RAM and 1GB compact flash storage here last week for testing. The Vortex86 is a rather slow embedded CPU. My guess is that your K6-III should perform a bit better. Anyway, I tried Xubuntu, puppy and Tiny Core on that machine. The only one that would give me a system that isn't too slow for using was TC. So imho the choice for TC was the right one. ;-)

[since1314]

Guidelines on how to partition a hard drive by Creating, Deleting, Formatting and Resizing Partition. --I think this article can help you find answer. I just want to finish the similar problem as you, so, I searched on the internet, found this article, hope it can solve your problem after you read it.