partitioning

I tend to do it one of two ways:

Typical home install:
/boot
/
/data
/shared
swap

Typical server install:
/boot
/
/home
/shared
/u (u for user...a convention that seems to defy meaning, but won't die)
/apps
swap

https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-11185-0.html?forumID=90&threadID=177260&start=0

actually, both /mnt and /media are used.
/mnt for hard drives.
/media for removable media.

/media has yet to be fully adopted by distros
I just use /mnt for all mount points, other than /usr, /var, /home, /opt, /boot, / and /tmp

If at all possible I use at least 2 physical drives whether it be Linux or Windows;

For Linux /boot, /, swap on drive 1 and /home on drive 2. If it's intended as a DB or WWW box I'll place /var on drive 2 as well.

For Windows I use drive or partition 2 for user and shared folders (data).

Why? - In case of disaster, drive failure or whatever I prefer to deal with restoring either the OS or my data, but not both.

partitioning scheme.
/ @ 1 gig
/boot @ 500 mb
/swap @ double system ram
/usr @ 5 gig
/var @ 2 gig
/opt @ 1 gig
/tmp @ 1 gig
/home @ remainder of drive.
the /mnt is a dir on / rather than a separate partition.

I expressly partion /tmp, as some cd burning software ( more than any other ) will use /tmp for the temprary disk images, if this is left as a directory on / wicch is usual, then since / is usually only 5 to 8 hundred megs, it runs out of space for these disk images.

I don't always use /boot, as if I'm rebuilding the system from a complete failure, then it's going to be needing rebuilding as well, so as directory on / works for me.

/var, not just www files, but also system log files often are stored here.

/usr, the applications that all users will be able to access.

/opt, standards say for after market apps, only borland's jbuilder has ever made use of this on me. ( which all commercial apps should do )

/home is as large as I can for simple reason that users personal data is here, thier own files, any single user only apps, cvs repositories... the space helps avoid error messages from users running out of disk space.

I usually reconfigure apache to docroot to /home
and kill any access above /home/~user by killing the permissions.
the ~user/public_html is where apache can serve hosted sites from, even with virtual hosts, or domains.

For my own system, I have 2 physical hard drives partitioned into 7 logical drives.

WHY?

I use each drive like a different file cabinet.
When I perform a backup the files on each drive represent different types of data and are already sorted for me.

Since my C: Drive has only the OS and related system programs installed, recovery from a critical system failure is not a big problem.

Even when I set up systems for other users, I typically set up at least 1 additional logical drive.
On that drive, I copy the OS CD, critical OS updates, and device drivers.

Should the user have a problem, I don't need to bring along any system files.

I also defragment the extra drive and set Windows to use that drive for the page file.
This helps reduce fragmentation on the primary drive.

Chas