Partitioning Hard Drives
The hard disk (or disks) on your computer provides the permanent storage area for your data files,
applications programs, and the operating system itself. Partitioning is the act of dividing a disk into
logical areas that can be worked with separately. In Windows, you typically have one partition that
consumes the whole hard disk. However, with Linux there are several reasons you may want to
have multiple partitions:
Multiple operating systems??”If you install Linux on a PC that already has a Windows
operating system, you may want to keep both operating systems on the computer. For all
practical purposes, each operating system must exist on a completely separate partition.
When your computer boots, you can choose which system to run.
Multiple partitions within an operating system??”To protect from having your entire
operating system run out of disk space, people often assign separate partitions to different
areas of the Linux file system. For example, if /home and /var were assigned to separate
partitions, then a gluttonous user who fills up the /home partition wouldn??™t prevent logging
daemons from continuing to write to log files in the /var/log directory.
Multiple partitions also make it easier to do certain kinds of backups (such as an image
backup).
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