Is the default partition setup for the latest version of Mandriva necessarily the best? I have 8 gigs of ram and I'm wondering if I should set it up differently.

Errm, which religion is best? brand of cars? brand of intoxicant liquor?

When you get unanimous agreement on those you can confidently expect agreement on this question.

I'm pretty sure that I can argue that it isn't necessarily the best, given the amount of different conditions and set-ups it has to cope with.

The amount of ram really isn't relevant top partitioning in any way except for swap. Assuming this is a desktop, you shouldn't end up using much swap, if any at all, most of the time, but I'd still go for a small amount, in any case (for the 'fail gracefully' reason).

If you want to suspend to disk, that would need more swap, but with modern disk sizes that probably isn't a problem.

The initial partitioning scheme I use here is as follows:

First Linux Partition - for root of file system (/) - about 10 GB
Second Linux Partition - for swap - about 2 GB
Third Linux Partition - for user space (/home) - all available remaining hard drive space

My reasoning is as follows:

Setting the system partition (/) at 10 GB results in about 50% free space so the system does not lose efficiency due to a shortage of free hsrd drive space. Even though the system can usually run efficiently with as little as 20% free space, I chose this size to allow for future installation of additional software.

Setting the swap partition at 2 GB allows for room to suspend to ram - my system has 2 GB RAM. I have never read that there is any correlation between the amount of ram on a system and the best size of the swap partition for this purpose, but since I have more than 100 GB at my disposal, I did not want to be too stingy with swap space. With 8 GB, you may want to consider using an 8 GB swap partition if you see my logic as sensible. Others with greater knowledge derived from formal training may provide dissenting input, and you should give their opinions more weight than mine because I have no formal training even though I have more than a decade of experience using Mandriva Linux. I started using Linux late in 1998 when I installed Mandrake Linux 6.1.

Giving all the remaining storage space to the /home partition allows for as much user space as possible. The /home partition is where your user settings are stored, and it is where you will store all those things you download such as music, video, and whatever else catches your attention. With your system's user space on its own partition, user settings and data survive the installation process, although you will have to install any software packages that are not installed by default. Mandriva publishes two releases each year. The initial release of a new version (currently 2010.0) usually comes out in November, and the spring edition (2010.1) is usually released in April. Using a separate user space (/home) partition can greatly simplify the transition, although I strongly recommend a good back up regimen to safeguard anything you keep on your computer that is important to you.

As stated in the previous post, you will get as many opinions as responses to your inquiry. I hope my opinion and the reasoning behind it will be helpful to you in developing a partitioning scheme that works well for you,

Contrary to what some old sources tell you, you don't need a swap partition unless you want to hibernate or have a RAM shortage (hardly the case for you!) And hibernating doesn't save much time on a big computer: it takes time to shift 8GB.

I use 10GB for root; you'll never run short on space, and things will stay tidy.

A separate /home partition is always worth making, enabling you to reinstall if you ever have a nasty accident. Other partitions are only needed on servers.

Things to consider ...

If you may have more than one distro you may want to split the file systems into distro-specific and not-distro-specific so you can mount the not-distro-specific file systems under all OSes.

If you want to snapshot file systems so you can a) back up sets of files (such as multi-file databases) at a point-in-time and b) verify backups despite changing backed up files during the backup then LVM is a solution (this is not really about file system sizes but does come into planning file systems).

If you want to make your system robust against applications that may fill /tmp then you may want a separate /tmp file system (1 GB should be enough). Similar for /var because that's where logs go and they can be very big. In both cases the reason is to avoid / filling which can be difficult to cope with.

On this laptop, where I do lots of miscellaneous 'non-serious' stuff, I have a 20G / partition of which I have used 59%, so if you are an 'install-everything' type, 10G might prove just a bit tight.

Note that the amount of space that you need for / depends on what gets shuffled off into other partitions; the laptop referred to above has a separate /home, but nothing else (/var, /tmp, /usr...) is separate.

The OP has not said anything about the size of disk being used (or, if there is another/are other OSs on the disk, how much is available for this install) nor what the machine is used for (the recommendations could be different for a server compared to those for a desktop).

Hi, I'm continually breaking my system and therefore have secured my data with separate partitions.

I'm not looking for any corrections, but I believe that a fresh install requires the formatting of / and /usr, at the least.

I have 2 other HD's on this machine, I leave them out of this as they are fat32 or vm(VBox) drive space.

Here's what I have done, and it works quite well. Although I am planning on an upgrade to ext4....

Regards Glenn