[tde-users] Partitioning advice sought

Hi, everybody . . . The time has come to say goodbye to Ubuntu once and for all. The spyware, security updates being held hostage, and inescapable attachment to the proprietary snap packages were bad enough. The new version of ProtonVPN doesn't work on Ubuntu 20.04, the last marginally acceptable version. So Debian looms. I'm trying to make it easier by replacing the mess of hard drives with a single 16-tb Toshiba enterprise drive. The plan is to install Debian on it, then copy /home, etc., to it. The old drives will then be backups. (I also have a 10-tb drive devitoted to pictures; that drive, too, will go into the backup safe.) The last time I did anything like this, a few years ago, it involved a peculiar recipe that, fortunately, doesn't apply now. And I realize that I've never done a straight install of a big drive to an EFI system. So. First, I'm trying to remember how to do a fill low-level check of the drive, to knock out any bad sectors, etc. I don't think GParted does it. Second, I'm trying to figure out how to best partition the thing, to get it to boot properly. I know there needs to be a dinky FAT32 partition someplace. What I don't know is where it should be and what size it should be. After that I'll have a non-home partition and a /home partition, as well as /swap. Is there any new thought as to the ideal size of the swap partition? Machine has 32 gigs of memory, and I do not keep a huge number of applications open at once, but I will have a lot of drive space. Any settled preference as to the location of the swap partition? (I remember that in OS/2 the rule was the most-used partition of the least-used drive. Speaking of which, there's a small walk down OS/2 memory lane here: https://ofb.biz/safari/article/1240.html ) It would be pretty straightforward but for the wad of stuff up top re. EFI, big drive, etc., with which I have next-to-no experience. Advice? -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/