Arch Linux

thefoodgeek

Member

Registered: 2011-09-05

Posts: 3

Partition Questions

I recently got a new laptop with a 750gb drive (~700gb formatted) and I'm having trouble with the partitions necessary to dual-boot Windows 7 and Arch.  I've created a 150gb partition to hold win7, and I was going to give Arch about 50gb and have the remaining 500gb as NTFS storage.  Whenever I try to create the partitions for Arch, I keep hitting the limit for primary partitions.  What linux partitions will work as part of an extended partition, and what must be primary?  Will the setup below work or is there a better way?

750gb Drive (~700gb formatted)

100mb - Primary - Windows 7 System Reserved
150gb - Primary - Windows 7
500mb - Primary - ext4 - /boot
4gb - Extended - swap
10gb - Extended - ext4 - /
35gb - Extended - ext4 - /home
~500gb - Extended - ntfs

Thanks,
TFG

lifeafter2am

Member

From: 127.0.0.1

Registered: 2009-06-10

Posts: 1,332

Re: Partition Questions

Read up on LVM: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lvm

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jdarnold

Member

From: Medford MA USA

Registered: 2009-12-15

Posts: 485

Website

Re: Partition Questions

IMHO, don't even bother. Just put Windows "reserved" on one partition (ugh), Windows on another, Arch on the third. You don't need to mess with a swap partition, esp. if you have a decent amount of RAM. If you want, you can just create a swap "file" (see the wiki for this). You don't need a /boot partition. You don't need a separate NTFS data partition - make most of the drive be the NTFS partition and install Windows on that. And have 50gb be the ext3 (or 4) partition for Arch. Simple enough.

Last edited by jdarnold (2012-03-21 15:19:26)

cfr

Member

From: Cymru

Registered: 2011-11-27

Posts: 7,168

Re: Partition Questions

You need a swap partition to hibernate, though.

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DSpider

Member

From: Romania

Registered: 2009-08-23

Posts: 2,273

Re: Partition Questions

If you create the first partition during the Windows install and choose it as the install location, it will not create a separate "reserved" partition.

I'd say keep the Windows partition small (15-20 GB) and have ~50 GB reserved for games – or more, depending how much games you play (personally I think 50 GB is enough) and the rest of the HDD as ext4, which you can mount as Read-Only using Ext2fsd from Windows.

Why 500mb for /boot? Why a separate /boot in the first place? ... Here's what I would do, all primary partitions:

15-20 GB NTFS "Windows 7 Home Premium"
50 GB NTFS "Games"
10 GB ext4 "Arch Linux" (boot, var and home. I like to keep my dot files in the same place)
500 GB+ ext4 "Storage"

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sonoran

Member

From: sonoran desert

Registered: 2009-01-12

Posts: 192

Re: Partition Questions

What linux partitions will work as part of an extended partition, and what must be primary?

All Linux partitions will work fine as logical partitions inside an extended partition. As for partitioning schemes, as you can see already, it's pretty much a religious debate.

magicalChicken

Member

From: in the sky

Registered: 2012-03-03

Posts: 73

Website

Re: Partition Questions

I would recommend putting arch's partitions inside of a LVM setup simply because this will allow you to have a seperate /boot partition as well as a seperate /var partition which will make for a much more robust system. I would also recommend having a swap partition, though you probably will noot need to use it.

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