Partitioning: A Different Perspective with Encryption and RAIDs

Introduction

Everybody’s got an opinion, and I’m no different. After reading Trent’s piece yesterday, I thought I’d add my two cents as my partitioning scheme is quite complex (though I can think of several ways to make it worse). For newbies, some of this is unlikely something to try, but you might want to read anyway to get an idea of what can be done.

For starters, I have 1GB of physical RAM, and 4GB of swap space split over two drives. I have two 120GB drives that I use for my primary system that are split into 8 partitions (and a logical ninth). Most of these partitions mirror (RAID-1) each other so that if one drive fails, the other maintains the system until I can replace it. You may note that the swaps are not mirrored, but both swaps and the md08 array are encrypted. Like Trent, I intended a dual boot with Windows, so the first partition on sda is NTFS. (Of course, I haven’t actually had a Windows OS on that partition in about two years, but it’s nice to know I have it if I find a game that won’t play nice in Wine.) Also note that /boot is a mirrored partition, which keeps the data safe, but upon bootup the boot loader (LILO/GRUB) accesses only one of the two drives (i.e., sda3, not md3).

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How I do my partitioning in Slackware

One Linux topic on which everybody seems to have an opinion is partitioning. “What’s the best way to partition my system?” newbies ask, and if they do so in a public Linux forum frequented by experienced penguin techies, they are bound to get at least a dozen answers, many of them completely different from each other.

So what is the best way? Simple. Whichever way you find works best for you.

When I first started out with Linux, I didn’t know either, and I did a lot of reading on the subject, and as a result I created a partitioning scheme that works best for me, and that’s still more or less what I stick with.

With my recent Ubuntu installation I didn’t do any manual partitioning, mostly because for one, I wasn’t planning on dual-booting that laptop with anything else, and for another, I wanted to accept the defaults so that I could see what Ubuntu does on its own.

However, when I’m setting up a Slackware machine, I have a method that I follow.

One word of caution. If you’re setting up your partitions presumably to hold a Linux installation, write down what you’re designating what (i.e., “hda1 = Windows”, “hda5 = swap”, “hda7 = root”, et al) so that you have it to refer to when you’re installing later. Nothing quite like coming to the point in the install where it asks you “where do you want to mount your home directory?” and you don’t remember which partition you created with /home in mind.

Been there, done that.

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