General :: Partition Layout For SSD One VirtualBox Image + 3 HDDs
Aug 21, 2011
Yesterday I got my new workstation featuring:
120 GB - OCZ Vertex3 MAX IOPS
300 GB - Western Digital Velociraptor (10k RPM, about 4ms avg. seek)
2x2TB Samsung Ecogreen F4
The system will be running Ubuntu with the main purpose of doing lots of Java development. Occasionally I have to develop Java in a Windows VM; for this I need fast VMs. I read a lot about SSD wear and maybe it is a bad idea to put the Eclipse workspace on the SSD, because of all the little writes the builds do. Perhaps the workspace (and thus /home) might find a better place on the Velociraptor which is real fast. How should I partition the whole thing to get the most out of it. LVM might be an option, too. Maybe putting a third partition on the SSD for one VirtualBox image. Currently I am thinking:
SSD: 2GB /boot, remaining space for / Velociraptor: LVM spanning the whole drive. 150GB /home Remaining Space for /virtualMachines or something like that Samsung drives (LVM over both or one Volume Group for each? - Latter would be better in terms of data security, because if one drive in a big volume group fails everything is lost)
I'm at a stage where I can start using Linux for all the tasks that I currently do on Windows and am keen to make a full switch to Linux. I have played with Linux a few times over the years, installing different distros etc, but I've never set up the hard drive partitions manually. I only want to make the switch once I have a good grasp of how to configure the hard drives as I have a lot of precious data.
A question I have is that normally I would set up a small partition for the OS, then have another large partition purely for data. What would be the best way to recreate this kind of set up with a Linux file system (i.e. keeping OS and user data separate)? Where would be the best place to store a mass of data that wouldn't necessarily be associated with one particular user? I've seen about having a separate partition for users home directories, but I don't really want the data associated with one user so it would seem more logical to store it somewhere more general.
I'm trying to install CentOS on my macbook over a Fedora Core installation.I'm getting this warning:
Quote:/dev/hda currently has a gpt partition layout. To use this disk for the installation of CentOS, it must be re-initialized, causing the loss of ALL DATA on this drive.
I have an image of the entire disk created using dd. The disk structure follows:
The image was created using:
How would I, if it is possible, mount /dev/sda1 from the image so that I'm able to read the contents?
It's not an option to clone the HDD again, I know how to do it if I had only cloned the single partition by itself. I hope it's still possible with the current image.
I downloaded an raw SD card image that has two partitions. It caused some file system errors when I tried to dd it directly into an SD card. I am not sure if the card is defective or the image. Is there a way to examine this image without writing it to a physical card? Like trying to mount the partitions separately or checking the tables?
i need to mount at least for read access NTFS-based partition image on linux from a file. File is binary copy of a partition. Is there any libraries or resources for this?
I recently installed Linux to run a few Linux based tools on a disk images I have, and I can't seem to copy the disk image over to my ext3 partition.
The particular distibution I'm using is BackTrack 4 r2, which is Ubuntu based. I can't seem to find specifically which version of Ubuntu is being used. The disk image is 108GB. It is currently located on a NTFS partition on a SATA hard drive connected directly to the computer. The ext3 partition is located on a second SATA hard drive connected to the same computer. It has 200GB total. I do not remember exactly how much free space it had but "df -h" showed a lot more than 108GB. The computer has 4GB of RAM and I gave it 8GB of swap space.
At this point it has been running for more than 12 hours. This is far longer than I would expect it to take had I been copying the file under Windows. How ever I do not have much experience with Linux, so if it's supose to take this long please let me know. I am planning on letting it run until I wake up tomorrow.
"cp -v" hasn't been very verbose at all. The only sign I have that indicates the computer is still trying to do something is the HDD light on my chasis that has stayed lit this whole time.
I'm trying to restore an image from a 40gb partition(6gb used) to a 100gb partition. I set everything up in gparted and and restored the partition image with clonezilla. In gparted, the partition shows the full 100gb partition with 6gb used, however when I boot windows and open the properties on the C: partition, it shows that it's only 40gb. Is there some setting to restore the partition image and use the full 100gb?
I am using opensuse 11.2 kde 4.4.2 . I had a working installation of sun virtualbox 3.1 with its virtual image on an ntfs partition before upgrading kde, then I upgraded from KDE 4.3 to 4.4. Now when I start sun virtulabox it gives an error stating that it cant access my hard disk image file due wrong permissions and that the image is read only. I cant create a new image on that partition due same problem but I can create one on my home partition.
I'm using the Virtual box on Ubuntu which has Windows XP on it. Probably after WinXP was automatically updated, I started getting an error message: "DLL C:WINDOWSsystem32DNSAPI.dll is not a valid windows image." and I cannot log on anymore. I tried to find a solution but since I'm using the Virtualbox, I don't know how to access the virtual "Windows folder" from Ubuntu
I have an issue with VirtualBox. My current setup is a machine running Fedora 10 with 1 Tb of disk space. I installed VirtualBox and created a fixed size disk image of 50 Gb for a virtual Windows XP64 OS. Now I require more disk space with additional 100 Gb. Is there a way to add another partition to the virtualized OS as if I added a new hard drive to the system?
In other words, I'd like to create another disk image by using additional space from the same physical drive and mount it under Windows XP in VirtualBox.
I installed in my Slackware 13.1 with generic kernel 2.6.33.4-smp VirtualBox packages taken from SlackBuilds.org (acpica, virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-kernel). Then for testing purposes I installed in VirtualBox Windows XP using CD-ROM drive connected to USB port. It's a lot of fun to see Windows as an application in Linux!
Now I'm trying to install in VirtualBox Linux Mint using either USB flash drive prepared with unetbootin or mere ISO image. Without success. It seems VirtualBox 3.2.10 OSE doesn't recognize either USB flash drives or ISO images though it recognizes CD-ROM drive connected to USB port. I found some advices searching Internet but all of them are useless.
When I created the disk, I specified dynamically growth, but when I tried to copy a file larger than the available disk space (500MB), a message showed up saying that it couldn't be done.
For a fresh installation using manual partitioning, one single disk (IDE).
If I selected:
For the root partition, I would like to use ext4, 10GB, but by default, the partition type 'extended' is suggested. Would there be any difference (advantages, inconveniences) if I selected the primary partition instead?
I have several partitions on my hard drive, and like to use the 'Create Custom Layout' option during the installation process, to make sure that I don't loose any of my existing partitions or the data on them.
I have attempted a minimal F12 installation from Fedora 12 DVD. But the 'Create Custom Layout' option is not an option in the menu.
How do I install F12 and tell anaconda exactly which partitions I want to use and format?
My current working partition layout is shown in the attached screenshot.
I want to use the following custom partition layout during the initial F12 installation:
This allows me to share existing partitions between my current working F10 root partition, and the newly-installed F12 root partition. So if there are problems with the new F12 installation, I still have a working F10 system to fall back on.
The other partitions with data on will be mounted when the intiall installation has been completed
Trying into install fedora. I am setting up my system as a dual boot over two drives. I have set up a custom layout and whenever I get to the step to write changes to disc it crashes with an unhandled exception. I have tried multiple times now, it always crashes.
Here is the first line from the exception report: anaconda 15:31 exception report Traceback (most recent call first): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packagees/pyanaconda/storage/devicelibs/swap.py", raise SwapError("swapon failed for '%s'" % device)
I am trying to install fedora15, my devices are as follows: /dev/sda1- contains windows recovery /dev/sda2- contains windows vista /dev/sda3- free space /dev/sda4- where fedora10 is existing.
Basically I want to scrap the fedora 10 in /dev/sda4 and install fed15 on the place (ext3). During the installation process fedora asked me, Which type of installation you want? I choose 'create custom layout'.
Then in the next window that appeared I choose /dev/sda4. Then it gives me four options like Create Edit Delete Reset
I want to know what does this Delete mean. What will it do, will is erase all the older partitions within /dev/sda4 i made for fedora10 (previously I made three partitions /boot, swap, /) or will erase /dev/sda4 itself. I am scared to continue installation further.
I ve got Eeebuntu 3.0 installed on one partition, and Fedora 12 installed on another, sharing the same /home partition, and within that, I have them sharing the same user folder. It complicates matters as Eeebuntu (with it's Ubuntu 9.04 base) still has Firefox 3.0.16, and Fedora has 3.5.6 (Adblock no longer works in Eeebuntu, I stupidly upgraded it in Fedora). I want to keep the same partition layout, but resolve these conflicts. Is there any way I can change the /home folder for Fedora, or Eeebuntu so that each one has different settings, but still be on the same /home partition?
Upgrading fc10 to fc12 with a fresh install. Made several partitions with fdisk. mkfs failed."Bad superblock at block 1.Need blocks 1 to 4 to create file system. Aborting.Tried mkfs -c, badblocks, dumpe2fs,no joy. No backup superblocks,because I had already fdisked.
Repartitioned starting at cyl 10. mkfs worked fine then. FC12 installer still could not initialise disk, however. I guess it looks at block 1, to initialise before it offers diskdruid, so it never gets to see my custom partition layout. How can I force the installer to accept my custom partition layout? Is a bad superblock at block 1 a fatal, throw-the-disk-away fault?
After reading Jeff Atwood's recent blog post on solid state drives, I'm somewhat deterred in wanting to own one. I basically want to use solid state drives in my home network for the following purposes (all machines running 64bit Linux):
My main (pwn3r) desktop computer. This will be my main workstation for work, video encoding, etc. This will be running an Intel 980x 6-core processor, making it a beast. My hard disk configuration will be:
RAID-0: 2 Crucial 128GB Solid State drives for the main operating system(s), essentially providing 256GB of incredibly fast storage.
RAID-1: 2 WD 2TB Hard Disk drives for media and backup storage.
My network firewall computer. This will be running Untangle on my home network for content filtering and firewalling (if that's a word). It will be running an Intel Atom D525 dual core 1.8GHz processor. The hard disk configuration will consist of a single small 16-32GB solid state drive for the operating system and little, if anything, else.
My home HTTP/SFTP/file/backup server. This will be running a dual-core Intel i3 processor; it will be used for some video encoding, as a local DLNA server, a HTTP server for a few largely static files and perhaps some interactive scripts, a SSH server, possibly OpenVPN, and will be used to back up critical files over the network. It will be running RAID-X (where X > 0), meaning RAID-1 or RAID-5 or 6 for fast, redundant data storage, as well as a small SSD for the operating system.
I'm not exactly made of money, and I can't really count on buying four new SSDs every year or so. I can understand replacing them in computer number 1 once a year... maybe, but for the other computers which won't be utilizing the drive very much (ie: they're not power machines), it seems ridiculous to buy new drives this often.
My question is this: can I actually depend on solid state drives like I would on hard disk drives? Also, is this the best economic option? I'd like to save as much power and heat as I can, and solid state drives seem to be the best option at this point.
Running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, GNOME 2.3Keyboard Preferences utilityAdding any Spanish language keyboard layout makes my Alt_R not work in ANY layout! I see that it changes Alt_R to "Iso_L..." for all/both layouts, including USA layout. When I click "Reset to Defaults" it's fine again, USA layout shows Alt_R again. I've tried all the variants of the Latin American layout and the Spain layout and they all do the same thing.What is "ISO_L..." and what's going on?i DESPERATELY need my Alt_R to work!
The system never uses more than about 250GB of HDD at any one time, so I would like to remove /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sdc1 from the LV and then from the machine and leave /dev/sda and /dev/sdb alone.
Does anyone know that if I use the command "system-config-lvm" to reduce the total LVM size to say 580GB, whether all data is preserved (I don't have any way at this stage to backup up 250GB of data, unless I buy more HDDs and that is the whole point of this exercise anyway - remove the two terrabyte drives to be used as backup disks).
Once I am happy that the data is safe, I will use "pvmove" and "vgreduce" to remove both terrabyte drives.
I would like to know the best way to dual boot an already installed Win7 HDD, with adding a second HDD to which I will install Mint9?
I have attempted this in the past with Mint8, but managed to screw it up some how with Mint 8`s Beta Grub2! So bear with me if I am skittish on repeating a "conventional" Grub bootloader selection approach!
This time I would prefer to install Mint9 to it`s own HDD with Win7 disconnected if possible, and installing Mint`s Grub bootloader directly to the Mint HDD installation, just to insure Win7s MBR isn't affected by the Mint9 installation, by keeping each O.S. and it`s bootloader completely separate and apart. Of course then comes the question of how to access my new Mint 9 installation, since reconnecting my Win7 HDD (with it`s MBR) will become the default, with no knowledge of any Mint installation.
Would a third party bootloader such as "Easy BCD" be the way to go? Or am I over complicating what I would like to accomplish here? The main thing is: NOT having to upset my twice installed Win7 installation again!
With my other computermore or less the same.Its a desktop PC with an spanisch keyboard. But i thinck i picked German keyboard during installation and now it starts always with german with some sort of 5 secs delay when setting it. I have to pick spanisch and i always delete the german layout, but after some time having it running, it resets to the previusly deleted german layout.
having problems with my keyboard layout since upgrade from F11 to F12. When I reboot and login into gnome I have to switch back to my layout as it has been set to USA default layout.
I'm running Ubuntu Server 9.10. I have two external USB HDDs. I use them each for different backup reasons. So certain data gets stored on one HDD, and different information gets stored on the other HDD.
I want to make a script that can look at the external HDD can determine which HDD it is, so that it can copy the proper information to it. Is there a way for Linux to determine this? Like if I see one HDD as /dev/sdc1, then unplug it and plug in the other HDD, should Linux see it as /dev/sdd1 or will it be /dev/sdc1?
I don't quite understand how it determines the /dev/sdxx values that it assigns to drives.
Currently running Slackware 13.37 64-bit on a notebook and finally have suspend/hibernate after realizing that USB devices, especially USB HDDs, need to be disconnected before suspend/hibernate can work. Problem is I have 2 USB HDDs that are connected to my notebook whenever the notebook is stationary for the extra storage so I'd like to create a script that would get invoked that would stop the suspend/hibernate process if certain partitions are mounted. I know what I would like to accomplish, but I have basic scripting knowledge so I was hoping to get some assistance.
1. script would basically store a user specified string containing devices that are non-USB, ie: NONUSB="/dev/sda /dev/sdb"
2. possibly use /etc/mtab to get a list of what is currently mounted and then remove lines containing whatever is specified in $NONUSB and store those values in $USB
3. run a for loop that executes 'umount' on each token in $USB 3a. stop suspend/hibernate process if 'umount' fails at any point 3b. if 'umount' passes then suspend/hibernate
