This is a tough question to answer and depends upon your situation. At a minimum you will need one partition.
If you want to dedicate some disk space for swap (which is recommended), you will want to create two partitions.
If you plan to dedicate the entire hard disk to the NST, four partitions are recommended. This will simplify your future upgrade process, provide you with a fall back position, and allow for the removal of the CDROM from the system (you will be able to do future NST installations directly from the ISO image).
Table 10.1. Paul's Dedicated NST Hard Disk Partition Recommendations
| Size | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 2GB | Used for NST hard disk installation "A". |
| 512MB - 1GB | Used for swap space. Use the mkswap command to format. I typically use a minimum size of 512MB and match the size of my RAM as a maximum size. |
| 2 GB | Used for NST hard disk installation "B". |
| Rest of Disk | Used your custom post install scripts,
SQL database storage, log files,
downloading the next version of the NST, etc. It is
recommended that one mount this partition to
" |