system. If any other partitions get corrupted, you can still boot into
GNU/Linux to fix the system. This can save you the trouble of having to
reinstall the system from scratch.

The second reason is generally more important in a business setting, but
it really depends on your use of the machine. Suppose something runs out
of control and starts eating disk space. If the process causing the
problem happens to have root privileges (the system keeps a percentage of
the disk away from users), you could suddenly find yourself out of disk
space. This is not good since the operating system needs to use real files
(besides swap space) for many things. It may not even be a problem of
local origin. For example, unsolicited e-mail (``spam'') can easily fill a
partition. By using more partitions, you protect the system from many of
these problems. Using e-mail as an example again, by putting the directory
/var/spool/mail on its own partition, the bulk of the system will work
even if unsolicited e-mail fills that partition.

Another reason applies only if you have a large IDE disk drive and are
using neither LBA addressing nor overlay drivers2.2. In this case, you
will have to put the root partition into the first 1,024 cylinders of your
hard drive, usually around 524 megabytes. See section 2.3.3 on page [*]
for more information on this issue.

Most people feel that a swap partition is also a necessity, although this
isn't strictly true. ``Swap'' is scratch space for an operating system,
which allows the system to use disk storage as ``virtual memory'' in
addition to physical memory. Putting swap on a separate partition allows
Linux to make much more efficient use of it. It is possible to force Linux
to use a regular file as swap, but this is not recommended.