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What Partitions do I need?

Okay, so what partitions do you need? Well, some operating systems do not believe in booting from logical partitions for reasons that are beyond the scope of any sane mind. So you probably want to reserve your primary partitions as boot partitions for your MS-DOS, OS/2 and Linux or whatever you are using. Remember that one primary partition is needed as an extended partition, which acts as a container for the rest of your disk with logical partitions.

Booting operating systems is a real-mode thing involving BIOSes and 1024 cylinder limitations. So you probably want to put all your boot partitions into the first 1024 cylinders of your hard disk, just to avoid problems. Again, read the "large-disk" Mini-Howto for the gory details.

To install Linux, you will need at least one partition. If the kernel is loaded from this partition (for example by LILO), this partition must be readable by your BIOS. If you are using other means to load your kernel (for example a boot disk or the LOADLIN.EXE MS-DOS based Linux loader) the partition can be anywhere. In any case this partition will be of type 0x83 "Linux native".

Your system will need some swap space. Unless you swap to files you will need a dedicated swap partition. Since this partition is only accessed by the Linux kernel and the Linux kernel does not suffer from PC BIOS deficiencies, the swap partition may be positioned anywhere. I recommed using a logical partition for it (/dev/?d?5 and higher). Dedicated Linux swap partitions are of type 0x82 "Linux swap".

These are minimal partition requirements. It may be useful to create more partitions for Linux. Read on.

How large should my swap space be?

If you have decided to use a dedicated swap partition, which is generally a Good Idea [tm], follow these guidelines for estimating its size:

So for a configuration with 16 MB RAM, no swap is needed for a minimal configuration and more than 48 MB of swap are probably useless. The exact amount of memory needed depends on the application mix on the machine (what did you expect?).

Where should I put my swap space?

Summary: Put your swap on a fast disk with many heads that is not busy doing other things. If you have multiple disks: Split swap and scatter it over all your disks or even different controllers.

Even better: Buy more RAM.


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