[mdlug] More new hard drive details

[Aaron Kulkis]

Jeff Hanson wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Drew <drew4096 at gmail.com> wrote:


> 
>> Finally there's logical vs main partitions. As the distros themselves
>> are re-installable while the data
>> needs better protection I had figured on going with main partitions
>> for data and logical partitions on
>> an extended for swap, /tmp, and all distros. I'm pretty sure grub can
>> handle it. However, the install
>> programs seem to have their own ideas on how to do this; they mostly
>> want to create all logical
>> partitions on a single extended, with no other main partitions. Is
>> there a reason for going either
>> way or even doing something different?
> 
> Following the old MS-DOS partition structure you have a limit of four
> primary partitions or three primary and one extended.  Only DOS and
> Windows (NT-XP, and maybe Vista) require a primary partition and the
> start of the partition they are located on must before the 8GB (else
> they won't boot).  Linux will run from anything anywhere.
> 
>> What about LVM?
> 
> Nifty way to manage drive space but it's just container management
> with some neat tricks thrown in.  Resizing an LVM partition isn't any
> easier than a regular partition as you still have to extend the
> filesystem within it separately.

And it's "one more thing to go wrong" (TM), which can make data
recovery in event of filesystem corruption nigh well impossible.


IF you ever use LVM, then the very definition of all files which
are under LVM are fully dependant upon one or more files in /etc
being completely intact.  Any damage to the / filesystem (i.e.
corruption) can result in ALL of the LVM partitions being unrecoverable
(unless you can afford to spend $hundreds to $thousands to reverse
engineer the LVM table through inspection of the managed diskspace.)