[Techtalk] factory install of linux & its partition allocation

[Anne Wainwright]

Dear James and others,

> 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?
> >
> 
> Could be worse - I found myself supporting a Windows laptop which had
> been partitioned, by the previous sysadmin, into seven partitions
> just like this one. Two Windows system partitions (it dual-booted two
> copies of Windows XP Tablet - overkill for a single user), two
> partitions just for the weird boot manager, a pair of data partitions
> and an extra one for moving files between the two dual-boot
> installations, something like that. Oh, and some empty space in
> between partitions too - all on a 120Gb drive. For some strange
> reason, the poor user kept getting out-of-space errors...
> 
> Three genuine swap partitions on a single drive seems silly to me,
> but I seem to remember some proprietary recovery software misusing
> that partition type for itself - are all three listed in /etc/fstab,
> or might one or two be 'imposters'?
> 
> 

Only one swap partition is in fstab along with one ext4 partition.

What I really want is one large /home partition. What scares me is the
collection of /bin to /var in those two partitions that get mounted
to /media

So, having read all the posts, I think that I need to delete the two
largest swap partitions, consider how to make the smaller of the two
ext4 partitions into the /home directory, leave the larger ext4
on /media for later.

I'll read up on this before I wreck it all.

thanks for the considerable input. I do feel like ringing the supplier
up and asking just what they really wanted to do.

Anne