Ubuntu

maximum hard drive space in future

Asked by winalways

Hello everybody!

I have been using Ubuntu 9.10 since 3 months now. Now am planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 beta release. I have Windows installed in a 60 GB partition and Linux in a 30 GB partition in 500 GB and 160 GB hard drives respectively(both on the same machine). I was wondering if I should install my new ubuntu in 60 GB partition. I wanted to know that in future if i install many application software in my ubuntu will it go beyond 30 GB in any case. In case of Windows it is possible to install software in another partition say D drive. Is it possible to do such a thing in ubuntu also? If it can be done I plan to remain with my same partition sizes i.e, 60 GB windows and 30 GB linux. Please guide me in this regard.

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Ed S
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Best Ed S (edgar-b-dsouza) said : 		#1

I would advise you NOT to upgrade your existing 9.10 to a beta of 10.04, since the beta is made for testing, and is expected to have bugs, even according to the download pages on Ubuntu's site. Instead, you should install to a new partition, and test that the new version of Ubuntu works with your hardware without issues, and that your daily usage can be done without errors. After a week to a month (depending on how much you need to verify) of using the new distribution, you can delete the old partition in which you had 9.10 (AFTER BACKING UP your data to your new partition, or an external drive!!!) and re-format that partition for use as something else - perhaps to later install a test copy of Ubuntu 10.10 or 11.04 :-)

Instead of upgrading, you could create a new partition on either drive, and install the new 10.04 on it for testing. Note, however, that if you allow this installation to write the boot loader to the MBR of the hard drive, then you cannot delete/format this new partition, or your system will become unbootable, and will need you to boot from a live CD and apply recovery techniques to make it boot from your earlier version of Ubuntu.

Regarding space required: Ubuntu being based on Debian, has access to a HUGE repository of software from there, and has also added its own. If you install ALL available software, it is easy to overrun 30 GB, or perhaps even 60 GB. However, if you only install the software you are interested in, and not all the software packages, 20 to 30 GB should serve you just fine.

Though you can't install software to another drive as such, while installing Ubuntu (or later, if you are an advanced user) you can create a separate partition on your hard disk to hold the /usr tree of the filesystem, which is where the files for most packages are installed. If you really intend to install lots of software, you could instead just increase the size of the partition on which you're installing Ubuntu. From what you say, you seem to have rather a lot of free space available :-)

In case you're later running out of space to store downloaded or created data (for example, ISOs of new versions of Linux distributions, or movies that you have created with a video editor) then you can create a new partition and mount it somewhere on your filesystem tree, and use that to store your data. Personally, I have a 40 GB "new-storage" partition on my laptop, mounted at /new-storage, which I use to download files into, and to save virtual machine images etc etc. This came about because I ran short of space in the 15 GB partition in which I had installed Ubuntu.

Hope this helps,
Ed.

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Rajinder Sandhu (sandy744) said : 		#2

just meet the basic requirements of Linux and save all your downloaded data on different partitions...this i had been doing very nicely and all data is safe. In case of any crash your system may not boot up with your one OS but it will boot up with other OS on your hdd... at the moment I have two hdd one is 200 GB and other 40 GB both are in use. I have installed 7 OSs ie Ubuntu 10.04 Ubuntu 9.10 Window7 and Windows XP SP2 one 200 GB and Kubuntu 10.04 Windows XP SP2 and Windows 98 on 40 GB HDD. Ubuntu is installed with 20 GB for ext4 file system and 515 MB as swap. And about 8 GB is more than enough for ubuntu 10.04 OS and rest all can be used for other uses.
I would advise not to venture into Lucid if you are not sure how to recover the system...you should know how to fix mbr of windows and recovering with grub-rescue option of grub-pc, It was so much trouble some I changed to grub-legacy which i feel is very good in recovery of grub.
Since Lucid is still in development stage so I think you should wait but overall I feel it will be a great leap forward in Linux operating Systems.

So for the Disk space of 10 GB for Ubuntu including Swap is more than enough rest is to meet your own requirement for saving files and keeping movies or other files. (eg HD movies need more space than avi files) ..nothing more is required.

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winalways (chethanexcel) said : 		#3

Thanks a lot Ed. for giving me descriptive guidelines. However regarding upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04, since I am home user I am going to try upgrading existing version. Hard drive space, I will remain at present partition size.