At 09:18 AM 1/15/02 -0600, you wrote: > > Don't disk quotas do a better job of that? > > > >Perhaps in /home, but another poster mentioned /var... There are several good reasons to partition a drive. Here are a few in no particular order; 1) some partitions get a lot of read/write access, while others do not. It's nice to keep them separate so that there are no unnecessary write operations (and hence fragmentation) of partitions that can do without. For example, /var and /tmp are rapidly changing, while /boot and /usr might remain static. Why run the chance of fragmenting or corrupting an entire filesystem when partitioning them is free? 2) it is very useful to have /boot on it's own partition, so in the event that the root partition is corrupted, the system is still bootable without repair disks (like Tom's). I have also heard of critical systems having several redundant /boot partitions. 3) it's also useful to have /home or /usr on their own partitions, so that they can easily be grown as the system expands. /usr can get very large, and /home might also if suddenly the number of users needs to increase. Nice to just add a new 90GB disk and mount it to /home... And once again, on a system that is getting no new software, the content of /usr is usually static and may be mounted read-only. can't do that if /usr is on the / partition. 4) I like to keep several partitions open after a setup, which may at any time be committed to different jobs. More mp3 space, another operating system, a native disk for VMware etc. Hope some of these made sense! -Bill