Changing hard disk partitions

[peter da silva]

In article <1991Apr23.131919.8083 at virtech.uucp>, cpcahil at virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
> >In article <1991Apr13.164855.1252 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
> >> for a 140MB disk I would compine /root and /usr so that they share 
> >> tmp space.

> >And I'd suggest the opposite for any disk over 40 MB. Why combine them?

> By combining them you share the extra space that you need to allocate for 
> building kernels, /usr/spool, /usr/tmp, and /tmp.  Otherwise you have to 
> calculate what you think you will need and never be able to go over in either
> partition. 

This is true, but on the other hand it gives you a relatively quiescent root
partition. With 140 MB I'd even throw in a 5-10 MB /tmp partition and almost
completely stop disk activity on root. This will pay in the long run, some
day when you have disk corruption and your nice quiet root partition survives.

Also, I suspect form your comments that SCO doesn't have this problem, but
in regular SVR3 the standalone FSCK really can't cope with more than about
a 20 MB root and you will have occasional link count table overflows.

> If this actually can be done, I wouldn't recommend it because a year from 
> now when you come up with a need for a dos partition and see that a portion
> of the disk is not allocated in the partition table, you might forget
> that it is used for unix and fdisk a dos partition on top of it.

Why would I see that? I can use fdisk to mark it a UNIX partition any time
I want. Besides, if I ever come up with a need for a DOS partition I hope
you'll put me out of my misery humanely.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  `-_-'  peter at ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"