Partitioning a drive

Partitioning a drive

[David Tice]

Hello to all:

Please forgive this newbie question. 

Hardware Dell 2550 server running Redhat 7.3.  The megaraid card found the new 
drives and enabled raid 1. 

I need to partition this raid array. Are there a few easy steps to partitioning 
the drive? ( drives are 146 gig each) they came from Dell. Drive information I 
do not have.  

If more info is needed please let me know.

David

-- 
System Administrator
Wheaton College
Norton, MA 02755
dtice@wheatonma.edu

Re: Partitioning a drive

[Michael French]

    I would assume that you went into the RAID bios and built a RAID 1
container (as Dell calls them).  How many drives do you have?  How many
containers did you build?  Is Linux already installed?  I can't tell from
your question whether your trying to figure out how to partition in general
or what partition scheme is the best to use or if you already have the OS
installed and you are just adding new drives and need to know how to do it
from the command line.

If it's a new install, just running through the installer will allow you to
partition the drive.  Linux will see the container as just a SCSI drive of
whatever size you set it to be in the RAID bios.  You can either let the
installer create a default partition table or do it yourself.

If you are looking for a partition scheme, I would do something like this:

/boot    50MB
/           800MB
/opt        ???
/usr        ???
/www    ???
/tmp      500MB
swap    2 x Physical RAM

I didn't put values in for some of the partitions because it depends on how
much usable space you have.  Having /www gives you a place on a seperate
partition where you can put all webserver content (if you have any).  Having
/tmp on it's own partition is a good idea so that a rogue program/user
cannot fill up your / partition since just about anything car write to /tmp
by default.  If you have other odd content, you might want to create a
seperate partition for it too.

Finally, if you already have the system up and running, but are adding new
disks, just use fdsk.  If this is a second container, it's probably going to
be /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc.  Just run "fdisk /dev/sdx".  fdisk can be cryptic,
read the man page or google if you need more help on it.  Once the partitons
are created, you need to format them using:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdxy                                    (X is SCSI drive ID,
Y is partition number)

Create mount points for the partitions by making directories on the
filesystem.  Next, use "e2label" under Redhat to label the disks like:

/sbin/e2label /dev/sdxy /mount/point                (X is SCSI drive ID, Y
is partition number)

Finally, add entries to /etc/fstab so that they will mount on boot.  Good
luck.

Michael French
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Tice" <dtice@wheatonma.edu>
To: <linux-admin@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 9:18 AM
Subject: Partitioning a drive


> Hello to all:
>
> Please forgive this newbie question.
>
> Hardware Dell 2550 server running Redhat 7.3.  The megaraid card found the
new
> drives and enabled raid 1.
>
> I need to partition this raid array. Are there a few easy steps to
partitioning
> the drive? ( drives are 146 gig each) they came from Dell. Drive
information I
> do not have.
>
> If more info is needed please let me know.
>
> David
>
> -- 
> System Administrator
> Wheaton College
> Norton, MA 02755
> dtice@wheatonma.edu
>
>
> -
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