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1.3. Defining the Structure of Your Disk Because physical errors on a hard disk are generally located on adjacent sectors, not scattered across the disk, distributing your files across different partitions could limit data loss if your hard disk is physically damaged. Normally, the partition type specifies the file system which the partition is supposed to contain. Each operating system might recognize some partition types, but not others. Please see Chapter 32, File Systems and Mount Points [433], and Chapter 30, The Linux File System [407], for more information. 1.3. Defining the Structure of Your Disk 1.3.1. The Simplest Way This scenario would imply only two partitions: one for the Swap space, the other one for the files1, called root and labelled as /. A rule of thumb is to set the swap partition size to twice the size of your RAM memory (i.e.: if you have 128 MB of RAM memory the swap size should be of 256 MB). However for large memory configurations (512 MB or more), this rule isn’t critical, and smaller sizes are acceptable. Please bear in mind that the swap partition’s size may be limited depending on which platform you are using. For example it is limited to 2GB in x86, PowerPC and MC680×0; to 512MB on MIPS; to 128GB on Alpha and to 3TB on Ultrasparc. Bear in mind also that the larger the swap partition, the greater the amount of OS resources (notably RAM memory) needed to manage it. 1.3.2. Another Common Scheme Separate data from programs. To be even more efficient, one usually defines more partitions to separate the system and programs from the data. The system partition will contain the programs required to start your system and to perform basic maintenance. Therefore we could define four partitions: Swap A Swap partition whose size is roughly twice the size of physical RAM. The default file system used by Mandriva Linux is called ext3