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I believe that examples of data partitions are /usr/ and /bin/. But these are just folders in the root directory, right? So is a data partition a folder in the root directory.

Catbird55
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3 Answers3

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Some proper terminology might help here:

Folders (correct term: directories) are used as mountpoints with which filesystems are made accessible to the linux operating system via mounts.

Filesystems can be it located on a separate (data) partition, on another device's partition, or confined within a file being located on an already active partition with a mounted filesystem. Filesystems located within files to be mounted through loopback a loopback device's.

This loopback device 'stuff' is what you need if you want to make the virtual disk of a virtual machine accessible.

In general, partitioning and filesystems go hand in hand, but are separate technologies:

  • partitioning separates areas on your device through partitioning entries in the partitioning table
  • filesystems set the standard on how to save files and folders on your disk, they translate the data objects in memory to a bitstream that can be written onto a disk, and also hint how this can be reversely done.

Mounts can be created temporary with the mount command, or statically through entries in /etc/fstab.

Remounting the new fstab entries is done with mount -a.

On the structure and the reasons of the linux directory tree being layouted the way it is, you really should read up about the filesystem hierarchy standard.

Then you will also see and understand, why these exist:

  • /bin and /sbin
  • /usr/bin and /usr/sbin
  • /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin
  • /opt
sjas
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Essentially yes. Linux follows a flat style directory structure where physical disks/partitions are mounted at locations within that flat directory structure. For example, if you connect a new HDD, you must mount it at a chosen location which can be nearly anywhere. For example, you could mount /dev/sdb1 at /mnt/FOLDERNAME.

tomstephens89
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You can divide the space on a hard disk into several partitions. On each partition you can then install a different OS if you want to. You can also use more then one partition for the same OS, e.g. by mounting them at different points in your file system.

To fully understand this you could use Virtualbox, create a new virtual machine and then try out the things described on this site on the virtual hard disk. https://askubuntu.com/questions/343268/how-to-use-manual-partitioning-during-installation

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Tesseract
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