How would you go about doing this?

The Orange Peanut · 2009-02-28 04:55:21

I just got a new laptop with Vista, and I'm going to dual boot with Arch (I've used Arch for ~year on my desktop). My inquiry concerns how much disk space I should give to each operating system. Ideally, I would have a partition for Windows, a partition for Linux, and a 'data' partition, but I don't know how big they should be.

My drive is 250gb big (which ends up being about 222gb when you consider hdd manufactures considering 1000mb = 1gb). On my Windows partition, I will have Photoshop CS4, Visual Studio 2008, and whatever other Windows programs I need (but those two are the big ones.) Since Linux is my primary OS and Windows is just for work (and maybe some games) my Linux partition need to have enough room to do whatever I need to with it. I think my desktop is using around 10gb with Arch + kdemod4 + openoffice + whatever other programs I have (obviously I can't list them all), but I think I might need more than that (to experiment with alternate dms, window managers, programs, whatever).

Now, the good part about this is that I have an external hdd that I will be putting videos and things I guess on. It's 120gb and I only have 9gigs left... but my data partition on the laptop is going to have the music I listen to most often.

But anyway, how would you partition your drive? How much space do you think each partition needs? As long as I'm at it, what should I format the partitions as? ext4 for Linux and fat32 for data (leaving Vista as ntfs)?

Dieter@be · 2009-02-28 11:20:22

10GB should do for arch. If I were you, I would put my entire $HOME on your "data" partition. That way you can share everything you want between Arch and windows and your disk space usage for / on Linux won't get out of hand.

Now, for the filesystems I would make your /home ext3. I have personally used http://fs-driver.org/ in the past to read and write to ext3 from Windows and it worked flawlessly for me.

Inxsible · 2009-03-01 01:28:30

I normally create :
/ -- EXT3 -- change it with EXT4 if you want to make use of extents and better performance -- 7-10GB
/home -- EXT3 -- same as above -- 5GB (home is so small only because I have a share partition which is where all my media files are. If you are not using home for anything other than config files, you will find that it doesn't fill up much.
/boot -- EXT2 - 32MB - 64MB
/var -- reiserfs - 5GB-8GB
/share -- EXT3 -- you can change this to EXT4 as well, but EXT4 hasnt been tested with fs-driver, so you might want to check it first since this partition is shared between Windows and Linux
swap
Windows C: (has only the OS)
Windows D: (Install all windows apps)

Last edited by Inxsible (2009-03-01 01:30:21)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-02-28 04:55:21

How would you go about doing this?

#2 2009-02-28 11:20:22

Re: How would you go about doing this?

#3 2009-03-01 01:28:30

Re: How would you go about doing this?

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