On Tuesday, 17. April 2012. 17.40.32 Frank Cox wrote: > My plan is to have everything that doesn't change (much) on the SSD, such > as /boot, /lib, /bin and so on. I want to put /tmp and /var and /home on > the regular hard drive. > > Now that I'm at the stage of actually setting this up I have discovered that > I don't understand enough about drive partitioning to make this work the > way that I want it to. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious. > > I could create separate partitions on the SSD for /lib, /bin and everything > else that I want to put there, then put / on the hard drive, but I would > really prefer to put /boot and one other partition on the SSD, and one > partition on the hard drive. > > How can I tell the system that I want /bin and friends on the SSD and /home > and /var on the hard drive, but still have just one partition on each drive > (plus /boot on the SSD)? If I create / on the hard drive and /ssd on the > SSD, then putting bin on the SSD would make it /ssd/bin and that would > obviously not be what I want to see. You want to create two partitions on the SSD and three on the HD. The SSD partitions should have the mount points /boot and /, while the HD partitions should have mount points /tmp, /var and /home. That's all there is to it, really. It seems that you are just missing the observation that (by default) everything that does not have its own mount point will be put as a directory into / during the installation. However, directories that *do* have their own mount points will be put on their respective drives, and just logically "mounted" into the / tree. So you just create separate partitions for stuff you want to go to the HD, and everything else will go inside the / partition, which should be on the SSD. Btw, I stopped bothering to create a separate /boot partition some time ago, and never looked back... What is your usecase for having it separated from / ? HTH, :-) Marko