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]](./stylesheet-images/important.png) | Root and /root |
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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.
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In the minimum configuration shown above:
All data under the /boot/ directory
resides on the /boot partition. For
example, the file /boot/grub/grub.conf
resides on the /boot partition.
Any file outside of the /boot partition,
such as /etc/passwd, resides on the
/ partition.
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.
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.
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]](./stylesheet-images/note.png) | Automatic Partitioning and LVM |
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The Automatic Partitioning option creates partitions as LVM volumes.
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