will install suse 9.2 on a 160 gig hdd i need some enlightenment on the best way to do this iam new to this so please bear with me the expert settings in suse are difficult to understand and follow so can someone give me the easiest way to do this. Thanks in advance.!!

With that much space, the partitioning depends on what you use it for. If you have a lot of video/audio and you want to keep it in /home, I would create a large partition and mount it at /home. Depending on how much software you want to install, you likely won't need much more than 20-30 GB for the OS, and software. I have a 30GB / partition, a 100GB /home partition, a 6GB /var partition, and of course a 2GB swap partition (double the RAM).

I agree with Pcghost - partitioning schemes are highly subjective and depend on what kinds of work you'll be doing on your machine. In general, for a drive 80G or larger, what I'd suggest is something along the following:

/boot = 128Mg
swap = 256Mg
/usr = 10G
/var = 10G
/ = 10G
/home = everything else

Quite frankly the Linux system itself really doesn't need all that much space, so give yourself the lion's share. -- J.W.

Keep in mind SuSE doesn't use a /boot partition.

You can give any directory its own partition if you choose, and at least for me, I prefer to assign a separate partition for /boot. This can be useful for security purposes and at least for me, if I see that a new kernel has become available in YaST, I like to save retain a copy of the existing one just in case something went wrong (which BTW has never happened). Just to clarify this last point, my Suse box always is set up as a dual boot, with the current kernel being the default but the previous kernel being the second option.

Clearly partitioning is a matter of personal preference, but for me, I just like the idea of giving /boot its own directory. It is not necessary to do this, but it is an option -- J.W.

That is a good point. What I should have said is that SuSE by default doesn't configure a /boot partition, but it is definitely not a bad idea.

i will be using it for audio and video and iam intrested in it being a secure box. i kind of like the
30 for o/s
100 / home
6 / var
2 / swap
someone mentioned a /usr partition enlighten me on that. is their any partition as far as security.
now the problem that iam going to have is i dont know the correct syntax to mount each of these partitions the newbie needs a push in the right direction please.

You can set up a separate partition for /usr if you choose, it more or less comes down to a matter of personal choice. As you know, all directories are under / and therefore will be created on the / partition, unless you explicitly assign them to their own partition. I'd suggest doing a Search to get some background about the purpose and function of each particular directory.

There is no specific partition for security. Security involves numerous issues (giving users appropriate permissions, using good passwords, shutting down unnecessary services, granting appropriate access on given directories to the different user groups, etc, etc, etc) In terms of partitioning, by giving /boot its own partition you can choose to mount it as read-only in your fstab.

Most likely you will want to have your partitions automatically mounted when you start up your machine. This is controlled by the fstab file in the /etc directory. For more info, "man fstab". Good luck with it -- J.W.

"man" is a command to print out the pages from the manual for a given command

Personally, I like to setup something like this:

/boot = 128Mg
swap = 512Mg
/usr = 10G
/var = 10G
/ = 10G
/home = 50G
/audio = 25G
/video = 25G
/downloads = 25G

I do not like having just one large /home partition. Just personal reasons...some technical too...

Think in terms of the unlikely. If I partition 'this' way and 'such-in-such' partition dies on me, what will I have wanted in a different partition. You will want a swap partition. You will want at least one partition to hold your own stuff. Focus the most space here. For most people this is the /home partition, but it doesn't need to be. Personally I would just stick everything else in one / partition (except maybe /boot). If your system dies you may want to try to figure out what was going on when the trouble started (/var, specifically /var/log). You may also want to keep your configuration (/etc).

Now if you were setting up a reliable server, I suppose you would want to segregate it as much as reasonable. For a home system, you really don't need to go overboard with partitioning (unless you are practicing, of coarse).