Formating new hard drive

[Taavi]

I have new hard drive I'd like to give for my Puppy. I boot from CD and I'm not going to install Puppy on the hard drive. I don't use Windows or so, just Puppy. Should I format my HD to ext3 or ext2 or what? Does it matter? What's the difference?

Taavi

[raffy]

If your RAM (memory) is a lot, say 256 MB or more, you really dont need the hard drive. You can use a CD-RW or DVD-RW for saving files, just burn Puppy as multi-session ("not fixated").

But if you have less memory, you can make use of swap partition (256 MB or more) in the hard drive, plus of course a partition for holding the pup_save file. ext2 will be fine.

[Crash]

I use the ext2 file system and it works fine. I personally like having the hard drive because it boots super fast, like about 20 seconds.

[Pizzasgood]

I'm using ext2. The difference between ext2 and ext3 is that ext3 has journalling, which I guess means it logs the changes to it in order to make fixing it easier. I'm not entirely sure though.

If I were you, I'd just make a small partition for Puppy, then if you want to put other things on the drive later it will be easier.

[GuestToo]

ext3 is ext2 plus journaling

the main difference between ext2 and ext3 would be after a crash, or after something happens that might have damaged the file system ... ext3 is easier to repair and much faster to repair

the journaling system uses up space in the file system, so there will be a little less space in an ext3 fs than an ext2 fs

for myself, i would choose ext3 ... Puppy 2.x's save file uses ext3

you can easily convert ext2 to ext3 and vice versa anyway

a few urls: 1 ... 2 ... 3

[Flash]

Taavi, I like raffy's advice. Why boot the OS from CD but risk saving your personal info on an unreliable hard drive? Surely you can find someone willing to trade a recent model DVD burner for that hard drive, and then you can switch to multisession DVD. (If you do find someone willing to trade, be sure to reserve the option to swap back if multisession Puppy won't boot after the second session is saved. Don't worry about how fast the drive can burn. Even 2x is fast enough for multisession.)

[Taavi]

Thanks to you all. And oops... I got a DVD-burner but somehow the multisession alternative didn't come to my mind. I'm so used to think that computer is the same as hard drive.

I burned the multisession DVD. I think it starts really fast too. And this all is so easy. And fast ... did it take five minutes .. to install whole os!

In fact I still need the hard drive too. I have my musical interests and so. I need room to store my yells and howls. And also fotos etc.

I have used wiki (PmWiki) for my writings and scheduling etc. That's why I have had Xampp installed in my harddrive, outside of Puppy. Lampp has many properties I don't need and it's huge, I know. But it was the easiest to install and configure. I have a partially puplic wiki in a hosted server (http://taavi.org).

Also I still have used Open Office, but only for opening those pps -file my frieds keep on sending me. I have still some missionary work to do.

Lately I have been discussing with several parents that are worried about there childrens computing. Youngsters use their parents' pcs' to surf around and doing things that I guess they don't know exactly what they do. And so daddys computer start to do funny things, gets slower and one day it stucks at all. Guess what I have suggested to them?

Taavi

[Flash]

Taavi, good for you!

Since you can use multisession DVD, you can have each thing you do on a different disk. You can put a music project on one disk, your pictures on another disk, email on a third disk, etc..