Setting up a /home partition?? Is this advisable?

[carlos123]

Hi everyone,

In my continuing saga of switching away from Windows to using Linux...

...I moved my hard disk from one position in my computer to another drive bay and when I booted up I was greeted by a wonderfully cryptic, no make sense to me, message. My OS said...


"(Repair filesystem) 1#" or something to that effect.

So I put on my researchers hat and went off to Google and Google groups to see what I could find. Well one person said this and another said that and the fsck manpage said something else and I got so tired of trying to figure this out in common English that I told my OS to...

"fsck -y /" (excuse my French :))

It seemed to do something okay but when I rebooted it told me it couldn't find something called "init" (whatever that is :)).

Since it sounded like my OS was calling me a name (kinda sounds like "idiot") ...I decided to do what any good old Windows user does when an OS starts acting funny. Reinstall!

But this time instead of using Redhat I will be trying FreeBSD.

Now I lost all my data of course, which really isn't that bad considering I'd just started in on Linux but I am wondering....

In the future should I create a seperate /home partition so that an OS can crash itself to death while leaving my accumulating data intact? That way I can reinstall an OS into it's own partition as often as I well please.

Any input or insight as to any problems with this approach?

Thanks.

Carlos

PS. Please excuse my sarcastic whit. It was either that or break down on the floor and cry like a baby which I was rather loathe to do :)

[skidhmor]

A /home partition is a good idea, as it will preserve your program settings as well as other data.
One caveat though, since you mentioned installing FreeBSD.
FreeBSD uses a different patitioning sheme than linux, as well as UFS for the filesystem, and it takes some tweaking to get it to see Linux partitions, and vice versa. FreeBSD's website has some excellent docs, though, so if you make sure you follow the instructions to the letter, all should go well.

[Lorithar]

Personally I partition down as far as I can logically take it when I install a *nix os -- it certainly doesn't hurt to minimize your dataloss should a filesystem die a horrible death. There are other benefits to a detailed partitioning scheme, however it requires good planning and a thorough understanding of the results to do well.