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Separate /home drive or partition.

category: residue [glöplog]
 
I read in the 09/12 ed of Linux Format that they suggest you have all your partitions on 1 drive.

This goes against everything I've ever been taught, seen happen or have experienced 1st hand.

If you put your /home on a separate drive then if your "/" drive dies then at worst all you have to do replace the "/" drive, reinstall the distro and there you go. As you reinstall your software, all of your settings will still be there as they were before.
added on the 2012-10-10 10:54:19 by ringofyre ringofyre
I heard you grow hair in strange places when you run Linux, but nobody seems to give a shit about that either.

Also, go away lamer.
added on the 2012-10-10 10:58:44 by havoc havoc
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added on the 2012-10-10 12:52:26 by ___ ___
actually i like having all mountpoint on one physical disk, makes things easier.
the point regarding data safety are of course valid but i think thats more important for servers and other storage systems.
added on the 2012-10-10 12:54:17 by wysiwtf wysiwtf
I'll be a little bit crazy and actually answer your question. =)

Your idea seems to be good failproof-wise, and you might make your /home dir much bigger (and use a Flash drive for / , if you know how to do it, and when a lamer wants to log in to your computer, IT DOESNT START OH NO THIS PC OWNER IS TOO BADASS!!!).
But it is not better backup-wise: you'll still need another drive to back up your whole /home (in case the lamer thinks HIS HDD IS CORRUPTED LET ME HELP HIM and re-formats your disk into NTFS).

I myself used the method you described in a fairly strange situation I have had two years ago. There was something wrong with the power supply unit in my computer, and one of my HDD-s started to park itself whenever the load on it was too big. Windows did not handle it too well, and I thought to give Linux a try.
Because of space issues, I had to mount / on one of the HDD-s and /home on the second one. I do not remember whether I mounted / on the affected HDD or otherwise, but this seemed to have helped me to climb through the parking issues before I could identify the source of the problem. Instead of hanging up permanently, Linux just froze for a minute or two, and afterwards managed to somehow restore the HDD activity (or something else -- I did not know, since I was a Linux n00b back then) and unfreeze without any data damage! There were only two permanent hangups, and at least one of them was because there was a few freezes in a row.

I think the All-On-One-HD principle might be justified by the fact the drives are BITS-whoppingly huge these days, and giving one drive solely to / (like some newbie might try to do -- some people people give 200 GB to C: !) is definitely a bad choice.
But, hm, I think spreading the dirs across many drives might be good for a multiboot system. On one HDD, you place Windows dir, Linux-1 root dir, Linux-2 root dir, etc, a space for the programs you might need urgently or some documentation, finishing it with a good swap place. On the other drive, you place our D:\ and /home and use it solely for large data, games and demos.
added on the 2012-10-10 13:09:10 by MyO MyO
Strangely enough Fox - you've described the setup I'm typing this on almost exactly - / on an external ssd and /home on another 2.5 drive.

The drive in the lappy is vista and rarely gets used.

The beauty of what I've setup is that it's more "overall" than having a persistent partition on a live usb key & having / on the ssd means it's small (xfce/debian) and fast.
Seriously fast.

Also, fuck off No Eccy. :P
added on the 2012-10-10 13:18:29 by ringofyre ringofyre
It depends. USB systems boot slow in my machine, despite using USB 2.0. Cannot pinpoint the reason.
added on the 2012-10-11 20:57:14 by MyO MyO
*slowly
added on the 2012-10-11 20:57:26 by MyO MyO
There could be another quirky thing about a USB system. Unless you use absolute UUID-s (AFAIR), small changes in BIOS settings or installing another drive could lead to your system not booting correctly. So make sure you don't rely on /dev/sdcurrywurst system! But this advice is akin to "The Rocket Launcher fires rockets" from a UT mod.
added on the 2012-10-11 21:00:11 by MyO MyO
Wurst that happens there is a "live" reboot and rejiggering fstab getting uuid from blkid.
Or something like that.
added on the 2012-10-11 22:03:45 by ringofyre ringofyre
Otherwise known as "The BFG is a umm.....big fucking gun!"
added on the 2012-10-11 22:04:51 by ringofyre ringofyre

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