6.2. General Information on Partitions

A Fedora Core system has at least three partitions:

Many systems have more partitions than the minimum listed above. Choose partitions based on your particular system needs. If you are not sure what to choose, use the Automatic Partitioning method shown in Section 6.1, “Choosing a Partitioning Method”.

Data partitions have a mount point. The mount point indicates the directory whose contents reside on that partition. A partition with no mount point is not accessible by users. Data not located on any other partition resides in the / (or root) partition.

[Important]Root and /root

The / (or root) partition is the top of the directory structure. The /root (sometimes pronounced "slash-root") directory is the home directory of the user account for system administration.

In the minimum configuration shown above:

Subdirectories may be assigned to partitions as well. Some administrators create both /usr and /usr/local partitions. In that case, files under /usr/local/, such as /usr/local/bin/foo, will be on the /usr/local partition. Any other files in /usr/, such as /usr/bin/foo, will be in the /usr partition.

If you create many partitions instead of one large / partition, upgrades become easier. Refer to the description of Disk Druid's Edit option for more information.

6.2.1. Partition Types

Every partition has a partition type, to indicate the format of the file system on that partition. The file system enables Linux to organize, search, and retrieve files stored on that partition. Use the ext3 file system for data partitions, unless you have specific needs that require another type of file system.

6.2.2. Understanding LVM

LVM (Logical Volume Management) partitions provide a number of advantages over standard partitions. LVM partitions are formatted as physical volumes. One or more physical volumes are combined to form a volume group. Each volume group's total storage is then divided into one or more logical volumes. The logical volumes function much like standard data partitions. They have a file system type, such as ext3, and a mount point.

An administrator may grow or shrink logical volumes without destroying data, unlike standard disk partitions. If the physical volumes in a volume group are on separate drives then administrators may also spread a logical volume across multiple disks and RAID arrays.

[Note]Automatic Partitioning and LVM

The Automatic Partitioning option creates partitions as LVM volumes.