[Techtalk] factory install of linux & its partition allocation

[Myrosia Dzikovska]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 6:26 PM, James Sutherland <james at deadnode.org> wrote:
> On 25/04/2011 16:56, Little Girl wrote:
>
>> Seems perfectly *normal* to me! (: (: (:
>>
>> On a serious note, though, that does seem like someone went partition
>> crazy and didn't know what they were doing. I have to say I'm jealous
>> of your three swap partitions, though. How does it run?
>>
>

I think I would write this off as "someone going crazy and not knowing
what they do". The latest "factory install" partitioning that I dealt
with, courtesy of Dell, was something like that

256M Dell Utility
1G swap
2G /home ext4
450G  / LVM

Now, talk about messes. I discovered this just a few hours before
leaving our partners' site, after they run out of space in /home
during what I thought was a simple data download on a huge and empty
disk. GParted does not work with LVM. Decreasing a LVM partition size
using command-line tools is possible, but moving a filesystem (or LVM
partition) is not, or at least could not be discovered with quick
google searching. I ended up doing some fairly scary manual operations
and hoping to God that I did all calculations right and won't mess up
the whole install just as I am about to leave, and with no tech
support on site.

I still cannot figure *any* logic to this kind of partitioning, and
have many unflattering epithets about whoever thought it up. I think
what you see is of the same sort - no point in wondering "why on
earth", just fix it before  you have too much stuff installed, and
move on.

Myrosia