A little help?  (reformatting laptop and linux)

My beloved tadpole (Dell 700m laptop) is have problems with its hard drive.  Started hearing the cachunnking of write heads not doing what they should be doing, and sure enough, dianositics exposed hard drive errors that are warranty replacement criteria for Dell to send me a new hard drive… (The hard drive is a Hitachi Travelstar HTS541… if I never see another Hitachi drive...)

I’d just recently gone and installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 4 as my primary OS (not recommended for non-geekazoids), and was loving playing around with the XGL-Compiz goodies.  (It worked rather well for the non-optimal display adapater on my 700m, I’d love to see it on the XPS laptop I recommended to Mom and Gary) It was all fun and games, and I had a semi-nice LVM (Logical Volume Management) setup for my various linux partitions, and nary a bit of Windows was to be found on the drive (except for the VMWare drive I kept for some rarely used Windows programs I needed to run).

So now I’m in a quandry though… what to do, how to partition, what file system to use…

So if you are at all on the geeky side, let loose with your comments on how you’d partition a 60GB laptop drive.

the rest below the fold, so I don’t put my non-geeky types to sleep.

I’m going to use Dapper as my main OS, but not opposed to dual booting other OSs (even Windows).  I just want to have a good idea on how to get the partitions moving, the last setup was great using LVM, but I think I oversized the partitions to begin with.  I like to have room (at least 2 DVD size worth for fiddling with videos and tv captures) to work with multi media.  Large scale backup gets sent to the SLUG (Linksys NSLU2) and the Maxstor OneTouch, so I don’t need a huge storage for a home directory. 

I’d like to play with customizing the kernel, and maybe try for a Gentoo Stage 1 install just for the geek cred.

So my initial thoughts (and this precludes any Window dual boot, as that swipe at least 5GB just for a functioning system.)

/hda1 /boot 256MB
/hda2 swap 2GB (I have 1GB+ RAM)
/hda3 the rest as LVM ~ 57GB
lv_root / 5GB
lv_spacer /opt 10GB (just a spacer to put other dirs from the main linux if need be?)
lv_home /home 30GB (might make those into other directories too /var/www, /opt/build...)
lv_media /media/misc 12GB for dealing with video files.

Thinking of going all resierfs, but wonder how that will work with suspend and hibernate… I’ve always used ext3 previously.

Should I consider JFS or XFS, if I’m going to be resizing this and that… should I mix filesystems to gain the best optimizations, or just hang with one, and deal with minor annoyances.

Posted by Jon in
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