Best partitioning?

[Gerald Thompson]

On Wed, 2005-25-05 at 02:40 -0400, Deron Meranda wrote:
> On 5/25/05, Gerald Thompson <geraldlt at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Now some people will say that you can put / into the LVM group too, I
> > tried this and I was unable to make my system bootable with / in the LVM
> > group.  This may change in FC4, ...
> 
> I've been putting / in LVM at least since FC2, on many different
> types of machines (intel); and I've never had problems.  The only
> time I had any sort of issue was using a high-end expensive hardware
> RAID (SCSI) disk array; but that was just because it picked the
> wrong SCSI driver at first (and that wasn't LVM's fault).
> 
> I'd still try putting / in LVM.  Only if for whatever reason you are
> not able to get it to work would I put it in a regular partition.
> Use LVM whenever possible, it will make your life so much
> easier.
> 
> Gerald, what kind of hardware did you have?  Did you try
> reporting the problem?  Were you using grub, or did you
> force a lilo bootloader?
> -- 
> Deron Meranda
> 

Hi Deron;

Dell Dimension 4100 - Ultra ATA 33
- P3 - 1 Ghz
- 512 MB RAM
- hda - 80 GB
- hdb - 60 GB
- hdc - DVD/CD read only
- hdd - CD Burner

On my first go with LVM, I created the hda1 - /boot - 250 MB, the rest
was all LVM.  I am thinking that my mistake may have been to put swap in
LVM, perhaps I should have kept swap and /boot both out of LVM.

I always do a full install - everything, so no dependencies issue.

On bootup I got part way through loading and then it got stuck for a
really long time.  At first I thought it froze, I gave it about 15
minutes then finally just rebooted the computer.

Eventually I let it boot up and just walked away.  It took about 30
minutes but finally got me a login prompt.  Lots of errors, could not
find /var or /usr, no gui at all.  I was able to log in but had no
access to any services.  I couldn't even use ftp to try and download a
newer kernel.  I also had no access to yum either.  I honestly don't
know enough about Linux to try and recover the system, so I just tried
reinstalling again.

/dev/hda1       250M            /boot
- remainder of hda creates physical volume LVM
- remainder of hdb creates physical volume LVM
- together they combine to make LVM VolGroup00
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00         2.0G            /
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01		1.0G		/tmp
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02         5.0G            /var
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03		2.0G		swap
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04         25.0G           /usr
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol05         97G             /home

Now of course I am also using the graphical disk druid during the
install to set everything up.  I know Disk Druid is notorious for
causing problems, and I hate the way that it moves the partitions
around.

The second time around it was the exact same problem, it took a really
long time to boot up, once I was able to log in, no access to any of the
mount points that I separated, /var, /tmp, /usr, /home.

I am sure there might have been something I could have edited, though I
have no idea what would have fixed the problem.  As I said my mistake
may have been putting swap inside the LVM group too.

On my third try I just decided to keep / outside the LVM group.  That is
how I ended up with my current configuration.

This is how I partitioned my 2 drives 80 GB + 60 GB - my current working
configuration:
/dev/hda1       250M            /boot
/dev/hda2       2.0G            /
/dev/hdb1       2.0G            swap
- remainder of hda creates physical volume LVM
- remainder of hdb creates physical volume LVM
- together they combine to make LVM VolGroup00
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00         1.0G            /tmp
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01         5.0G            /var
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02         25.0G           /usr
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03         97G             /home

I don't consider myself a newbie, but I am definately only an
intermediate user.  I tried reading some documentation on the Internet
and on Google, but I couldn't find a solution to my problem, that is why
I gave up and took / out of the LVM.

I am happy to say one thing though, the whole reason for reinstalling
and using both drives in the first place is because I no longer use
windows xp in dual boot.  I am now Linux only.

Sincerely,
Gerald