Why Partition a Hard Disk

[Rob Hulsebos]

In article <4360004 at wdl1.UUCP> jeff at wdl1.UUCP (Jonathan J Jefferies) writes:
>Is there any definitive reason to partition a hard disk?

That depends on the size of the disk and what you do with it. My secondary
disk (140M) is not partitioned. My primary disk is, for the following 
reasons:

- the bootstrap program doesn't fit in 512 bytes, so the first partition
  is ment to store the bootstrap in
- the root-filesystem must not be to large, otherwise 'fsck' requires a 
  temporary file to store its data in. Therefore, a root-partition is created.
  As an added bonus, I can create a RAMdisk with the root-filesystem in it
  and then mount the other filesystems. This of course only works when the
  root-filesystem is not very large and you have enough RAM.
- because the root-filesystem is now separate, another partition is needed
  for the /usr-filesystem
- user's home directories are created in the /usr1-filesystem on its own
  partition. This allows me to upgrade the root- and usr-filesystems without
  having a need to save all user-directories on tape first and read them
  back later. 

I also have a separate partition for swapping purposes, but this is not 
really necessary.

>My machine is a System V implementation by Unisoft 
Mine is System V.2 by UniSoft.

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