Linux Partitioning

[darkzar99]

Ok, i have 2 hard drives, in a computer, when windows was on it I would use the master drive as the c: drive and use that to store all programs on, and the d: drive (slave) for all my data, (pics, music, docs, video), when i set up the 2nd drive, where should i set the mount point? also if it is in e.g. /DATA if i have to format the master drive to reinstall linux or something will the slave drive still ahve all data on it?

[Sparda]

when you installed linux you should have mounted it a /home, thats the easist way, but since you havm't...

[darkzar99]

i havent installed it yet, im getting ready to

[Sparda]

oh, good, when you are installing... format the second hard drive and mount it as /home, all your data will now go on to the second hard drive.

[debianuser]

oh, good, when you are installing... format the second hard drive and mount it as /home, all your data will now go on to the second hard drive.

no need to format it - coz format would mean for me "delete" - just edit the fstab and I would suggest to mount it in a separate folder than home, as far as it goes, if you partition your first hard disk by default, "/home" will be on the first harddisk and include in /root partition - so mounting "/home" to another disk - that's shaky!

:arrow:

[Erroneous]

You may also wish to consider mounting the second drive as /home/USERNAME. That way you can still boot as another user should you not have the second drive in (like if it was external, or you would ever take it out). I also have mounted drives into /data and it is just fine. It makes it easier if say it is in FAT32 and mounted to /data, that way you can read/write from windows and linux (without installing flaky ext2/3 drivers for Windows or flakier captive NTFS driver for Linux). But there are problems with FAT 32 I think, though I haven't come across them.

[dirty D]

no, if you have another partition mounted at /DATA or /home or whatever you can format the root partition without losing the data on the other partition.

[Erroneous]

no, if you have another partition mounted at /DATA or /home or whatever you can format the root partition without losing the data on the other partition.

True, provided that the second drive wasn't formatted in NTFS in the first place. Then you can't write to it reliably without formatting it to a different file system. But you could back up and then reformat, but remember to edit /etc/fstab afterwards.