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Old 14th January 2009
cajunman4life cajunman4life is offline
Real Name: Aaron Graves
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Coolidge, Arizona
Posts: 203
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I'll take a moment to throw my $0.02 in favor of partitions, no matter what the purpose of the machine is. I'll share with you this little story for an explination:

A while back I built a FreeBSD workstation. I did a single / partition (and a swap partition) on a 160GB drive, thinking I really shouldn't do it that way, but figured it would only be temporary. I should have stopped right there, as that was the first time I've done a single / partition...

One long compile gone awry later (matter-of-fact, I was building openoffice.org-3), and the machine locked up somehow. Power-cycle, and upon boot-up the system complains that / was not unmounted properly, and advised me to run fsck manually. Long story short, fsck was never able to fully fix the corruption, and the system was never able to return to full operation. So, I booted with a fixit cd, tarred and copied my home directory, and both etc's (/etc and /usr/local/etc), and gathered a list of software I had installed (ls /var/db/pkg > softlist). Built the system with proper partitions, restored my home dir and the etc's, and started re-building all the ports I had installed.

Since then I've managed to lock the system up a few times, and when I reboot I go to single user, and use "fsck -p" and everything is fixed and the system returns to normal.

So, I'd say be very, very careful with using a single partition. I'm thinking most linux distros use a single partition by default now due to having journaling filesystems (where hopefully there won't be as many inconsistencies after a crash).
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