[solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

Atreides · 2009-11-28 00:17:16

EDIT: Screwed up the install, deleted Windows by accident...
Couldn't be happier, Arch is incredible

I'm planning to dual boot XP and Arch, and having little experience with dual booting or partitioning I thought it would be good to check here before I mess something up. My drive is only 60gb (Windows says total size=55.8) so I'm not sure how this will work out.

Ideally I'd like to have one NTFS partition with XP, one NTFS partition where I can store my files which I can access in either Arch or XP, and then the array of partitions which come along with Arch. This is what it gives as an example in the wiki:

     sda1 
        Windows - 30GB should be enough. Many new games exceed 10GB each so bear this in mind. 

    sda2 
        /boot - 100MB is enough (optional) 

    sda3 
        / - about 10GB is appropiate 

    sda4
        swap - between 1024MB and 1512MB (optional) 

    sda5
        /home - use rest of hard drive (optional)

My system is a Thinkpad X60s, 1.66 Core Duo, 2gb RAM (if any of that matters).

I don't install too many programs on my laptop, so I don't think the actual Windows partition needs to be terribly large. More emphasis on the storage partition with docs/pics/music. Would something like this work?:

Windows: 5-10gb
Storage: 20gb
Rest Arch? Need help breaking these (swap, etc.) up!

Lastly, is there any way I could do all this without destroying my original Windows install? I can move all the data off, but it is a pain to install drivers, programs, tweak, configure, etc.

Last edited by Atreides (2009-12-23 02:26:41)

kermana · 2009-11-28 02:01:03

Hi!

If i were you I would probably go with something like:

sda1 ntfs 10 g --> C:\
sda2 ntfs 30 g --> D:\ (storage)
sda3 swap 1g
sda4 ext4 19g --> /

It is mostly personal preference so change the numbers as you like. Also you can maybe use something like gparted to resize your current install and you really should make a backup. I have heard quite some horror stories about resizing partitions.

Last edited by kermana (2009-11-28 02:18:07)

Atreides · 2009-11-28 03:14:28

Thanks for the input kermana

So do I only need one partition for Arch? In the beginner's wiki it lists all kinds of things:
/boot
/home
/usr
/tmp
/var
?

I'll probably go with what you said however. 10 for windows, 30 for data, 1 for swap, and the rest for Arch.

I'll try and be careful resizing partitions, do you know if its possible to write new partitions in cfdisk (in the Arch install) without erasing all the data? I vaguely recall it saying that it would, but I'm not really sure.

fsckd · 2009-11-28 04:31:18

Atreides wrote:

So do I only need one partition for Arch? In the beginner's wiki it lists all kinds of things:
/boot
/home
/usr
/tmp
/var

It depends on your personal preferences and your intended usage. For example, people running Arch as a server may want to keep /var as a separate partition. That way if the / partition corrupts, the logs may still be accessible.

I'll try and be careful resizing partitions, do you know if its possible to write new partitions in cfdisk (in the Arch install) without erasing all the data? I vaguely recall it saying that it would, but I'm not really sure.

Yes, you'll end up deleting things. Well, actually no, but that's kind of an advanced tactic that mortals should dare not approach.

graysky · 2009-11-28 07:58:39

My preference if I had 60 gigs for your role:

/dev/sda1 (30 G/NTFS)
/dev/sda2 (10 G/EXT4) (Linux Root)
/dev/sda3 (175 Megs/EXT2 or 3) (/boot)
/dev/sda4 (1-2x your physical RAM depending on what you do with it/SWAP) (swap space)

Why the 175 meg boot? I like to put gparted-live and memtest on my /boot partition. In addition to a great partition editor, gparted live is a great rescue option with GUI if you need it. Anyway, gparted-live is about 110 megs, memtest is tiny, and your kernels will take up some space. Why no dedicated /home partition? Your drive is kind small and I would had to have it fill up overestimating your /home size.

You asked about not destroying your install. Yes, use gparted to resize your current windows partition, then build the partitions you want under it.

OT: have you considered purchasing a larger HDD for the laptop? For under $100 you can get one that's nearly 10x the size and probably faster assuming your laptop will support it.

Last edited by graysky (2009-11-28 08:02:05)

IgnorantGuru · 2009-11-28 16:21:57

I'll throw in the idea that when you're repartitioning anyway, it's handy to create a spare system partition. This lets you test new versions of the OS, upgrades, other distros, etc, without killing your main system.

Also, linux root only needs to be 6GB, maybe 7 if you plan to install something really large. My current arch install is only consuming 3.6GB.

Personally, I would put /home on the root partition, then setup a separate data partition for most of the user files (documents, music, movies, etc). If you want this data to be accessible from both Windows and Linux, it's easier to make it NTFS. NTFS would also allow you to install some of your Windows games to it instead of your system drive.

Windows Vista consumes at least 12GB (just the base install).

Also, I think your swap partition should be the first one for best speed. With 2G of ram, a 1G swap should be plenty since you have limited space. If you plan to do a lot of memory intensive stuff then 2GB is better. I have 2GB ram with a Java server running and my swap file is rarely used in Arch at all.

So I would suggest something like this:
sda1 1GB linux swap
sda2 6GB ext3 linux root / (includes /boot /home...)
sda3 30GB NTFS Windows
sda4 Extended
sda5 7GB spare system partition
sda6 16GB (remaining space) ext3 or NTFS for /user data

With this setup, your entire linux system would be on sda2, including /home with all the user settings. That way you can make a system backup of that partition cheaply (backup would be about a 1-2GB file saved on another partition and then burned to DVD). And if you install another linux system on sda5 it can share the sda1 swap partition - no need for two.

Atreides · 2009-11-28 17:27:47

fsckd- I have no plans on using my little laptop as a server, so I suppose all those directories will fall under /. The only one where I've heard conflicting opinions is with /boot, would it be best to have that as part of / or on its own partition?

And I'll avoid cfdisk and use this gparted I keep hearing about, I am only mortal . I'm not sure how this works though, can I use gparted to make partitions and then somehow bypass cfdisk/partition in the Arch install?

graysky- That seems fairly reasonable. Those extra utilities you mentioned (gparted-live and memtest) are quite small and it seems sensible to add them to /boot in the event that I should need them in the future.

Also, is it actually bad to completely fill my HDD? I know HDDs need some degree of "emptiness" but I was never actually sure to what degree or how this would apply to dual booting.

Will gparted only run under Arch? As of right now I have only vm'd Arch, would I have to do an actual install of it, install gparted, then resize my Windows partition? I'm a little confused as to what order the process should go, windows-arch-gparted.

I know I should get a larger HDD, waiting for SSDs to come down a tad more in price

guru- I don't plan on installing too much in Arch, so it would be reasonable to make the root small as you said. Whilst the idea of having a spare partition is intriguing, I don't know that I really should indulge in it given how strapped for space I am as it is. I may use that idea next time I reinstall on my desktop however (500gb).

I'm only running XP, so no worry about 12gb install. 1gb of swap seems reasonable, I really only plan on doing basic word processing/web browsing within Arch. I'm not entirely sure how to order the partitions, I'll post what I'm thinking of doing right now.

1gb linux swap (swap)
175mb boot (ext3)
6gb arch (ext4)
20gb windows (NTFS)
the rest (~30gb) data (NTFS)

How does that sound , and in what order should I have these partitioned (assuming I have a swap,boot,windows,arch,and data partition)?

Sorry for all the questions, I've never done this before and want to make sure I don't screw up

Last edited by Atreides (2009-11-28 17:31:16)

IgnorantGuru · 2009-11-28 18:00:41

Atreides wrote:

Will gparted only run under Arch? As of right now I have only vm'd Arch, would I have to do an actual install of it, install gparted, then resize my Windows partition? I'm a little confused as to what order the process should go, windows-arch-gparted.

You might burn a copy of SystemRescueCD from sysresccd.org It has gparted and a lot of other utils - gives you root access to your system. It's just a live linux cd but it's very reliable and simple - has worked on every system I've ever tried it on.

Atreides wrote:

guru- I don't plan on installing too much in Arch, so it would be reasonable to make the root small as you said. Whilst the idea of having a spare partition is intriguing, I don't know that I really should indulge in it given how strapped for space I am as it is. I may use that idea next time I reinstall on my desktop however (500gb).

I find it very useful so I still recommend it. You could always use it for user files until you want it as a system partition. For your 500gb, I would recommend 2 or 3 spares. They're pretty handy.

For XP, another option would be an 8 or 10GB partition just for the system, then install your games on the user partition. The advantage to this is that you can make a backup of the XP partition more easily that way, and can also restore it without overwriting user data. I suggest this because Windows is best reinstalled every few months, which is very fast once you have a backup. Saves a lot of messing around trying to fix it when it breaks. You might have to reinstall your games, but the base Windows stuff would be done. You can see one backup solution here... http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_To_Bac … ng_Systems

Atreides wrote:

1gb linux swap (swap)
175mb boot (ext3)
6gb arch (ext4)
20gb windows (NTFS)
the rest (~30gb) data (NTFS)

That looks okay except you want to put Windows on one of the first three partitions. The reason for this is that partition four becomes the 'extended' partition (doesn't hold data, just the table for the extended partitions #5 and up). Windows doesn't like being installed to an extended partition, particularly when used with grub.

That said, I also like to keep linux next to swap so the drive doesn't travel so far (at least in theory). So maybe this...
1gb linux swap (swap)
6gb arch (ext4)
20gb windows (NTFS)
--- extended ---
175mb boot (ext3)
the rest (~30gb) data (NTFS)

I think that would work fine.

Atreides · 2009-11-29 00:37:55

Regrettably, I don't have a cd drive . I'll have to search and see if I can find a way to boot gparted from a usb drive.

I think understand the process though. Boot gparted, re-size windows + make other partitions, then install Arch (also from usb). My question then is, is it possible for me to make my own partitions with gparted prior to installing Arch, then bypass the whole Arch partition creation thing? Or will I be able to select pre-made partitions?

I will definitely try out your "spares" suggestion in the future, would've actually helped me a lot with some things in the past.

I will also follow your suggestion on only having a "core" windows partition, this whole backup scheme seems as though it could be quite handy. I frequently re-install windows, and looking back it seems as though I have wasted a lot of time reinstalling everything and tweaking the way I would like it to be each time. The games I usually play on my laptop (D2, AOE2, old school DOS) aren't terribly large, so it shouldn't be an issue to install them to the "documents" partition.

I think this is what I'll go for (based on your suggestions and others):

sda1 Swap (linux swap) 1gb
sda2 Arch (ext4) 6gb
sda3 Windows (NTFS) 10gb
sda4 --extended--
sda5 /boot (ext3) 175mb
sda6 Data (NTFS) ~35gb

I only want to know the answer to my question above, then I'll start to go to town

Thanks to everyone for all the help :3

IgnorantGuru · 2009-11-29 01:48:33

Atreides wrote:

Regrettably, I don't have a cd drive . I'll have to search and see if I can find a way to boot gparted from a usb drive.

I know SystemRescueCD can be installed onto a USBstick.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manu … _USB-stick

Or just about any live CD should have gparted.

I think understand the process though. Boot gparted, re-size windows + make other partitions, then install Arch (also from usb). My question then is, is it possible for me to make my own partitions with gparted prior to installing Arch, then bypass the whole Arch partition creation thing? Or will I be able to select pre-made partitions?

Whatever you use to partition your drive, you can then select manual partitioning when you get to that section of the install, and just tell Arch where to mount the partitions, and whether to format them. Given your example layout:

sda1 Swap (linux swap) 1gb
sda2 Arch (ext4) 6gb
sda3 Windows (NTFS) 10gb
sda4 --extended--
sda5 /boot (ext3) 175mb
sda6 Data (NTFS) ~35gb

You would tell Arch to use sda1 as swap and it can format it. Sda2 would be mounted to / and formatted. and sda5 would be /boot and formatted. You could tell it about the other partitions, or just do that later by editing fstab. So the minimum during the install would be

sda1 swap FORMAT
sda2 / FORMAT ext4
sda5 /boot FORMAT ext3

However, if you do need to reinstall Windows (perhaps gparted doesn't work as planned), I recommend installing Windows first, then Arch. That way Arch will find Windows and add it to grub. If you install Windows after Arch, it will overwrite the MBR and you'll need to reinstall grub.

Also, I don't know gparted - I just use cfdisk - but it may not allow you to move your Windows partition to sda3. It may just let you resize it. Then again it may - just don't know. But I wanted to prepare you for the possibility. Also, defragging the Windows partition is usually recommended before attempting to resize it.

If you Windows installation is older than a year or so, I actually recommend just repartitioning and formatting the whole drive from scratch. Windows will usually run a lot better. And then you wouldn't need gparted, you could just use the partitioner in the Arch install.

I will also follow your suggestion on only having a "core" windows partition, this whole backup scheme seems as though it could be quite handy. I frequently re-install windows, and looking back it seems as though I have wasted a lot of time reinstalling everything and tweaking the way I would like it to be each time. The games I usually play on my laptop (D2, AOE2, old school DOS) aren't terribly large, so it shouldn't be an issue to install them to the "documents" partition.

That sounds good - the backups are amazingly convenient for maintaining Windows.

Enjoy the process.

fsckd · 2009-11-29 02:55:11

Atreides wrote:

I am only mortal

Sadly. Are you sure you haven't run into any sandtrout lately ... ?

Resizing NTFS is best done from an MS tool. If you have one, do use that instead. Before resizing do back up all the things you find important and can not replace. Also, defrag the drive. That may lessen the chance of errors. IIRC, do not resize from the start of the partition, only from the end.

Atreides · 2009-11-30 21:04:05

fsckd- Melange is quite expensive nowadays

I'm glad gparted can be booted from usb. I wouldn't have a problem reinstalling Windows, but it was a pain to do in the first place. For some reason Thinkpads are very picky about installations, and like the drive to be inside the laptop when installing Windows (had to borrow a friends external cd drive to do this the first time). I'll try gparted to see if I can resize/move Windows, but if that fails it won't be too big of an issue to simply reinstall. I'll make sure to defrag extensively before I try resizing.

I appreciate all the guidance, I feel a good deal more confident about the whole thing now. Still, keep an eye out for another thread when I attempt this this weekend.

fsckd · 2009-11-30 21:08:11

Good luck.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-11-28 00:17:16

[solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#2 2009-11-28 02:01:03

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#3 2009-11-28 03:14:28

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#4 2009-11-28 04:31:18

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#5 2009-11-28 07:58:39

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#6 2009-11-28 16:21:57

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#7 2009-11-28 17:27:47

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#8 2009-11-28 18:00:41

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#9 2009-11-29 00:37:55

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#10 2009-11-29 01:48:33

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#11 2009-11-29 02:55:11

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#12 2009-11-30 21:04:05

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

#13 2009-11-30 21:08:11

Re: [solved]Help me organize my partitions for dual booting.

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