Partitioning disks in dual boot

snovik · 2012-05-06 19:15:47

I never had any dual boot and sorry if my question is too newbie. I believe I have read all manuals but am still lost and afraid to mess such fundamental thing up. I switched to linux about a year ago. After the last ubuntu upgrade I really felt that ubuntu team is very serious to fix their number one bug - market share of ms windows. So I looked to arch in a virtual machine and really liked it. But I also had so big problems (like not being able to boot at all). Nevertheless I still feel like making it my primary OS.

What I'd like to have is to have arch as primary OS and ubuntu as backup. And I would like to have the same /home on both systems. It sounds easy but firstly I do not know if that is a good idea overall. Secondly I have doubts that it can all work seamlessly. But I want to consider it.

What would be the best disk partitioning for such dual boot? I need at least two partitions for each OS (boot + swap) but would like to fully follow the ideal arch's recommendation for 4 partitions. What should I put on extended or maybe the 4 partitions for arch is just too much?

Thanks. I really liked arch though it cost me two full evenings to set all properly up to fully functioning gnome.

funkypotatoe · 2012-05-06 19:25:51

Use GParted in Ubuntu to resize your disk. Install Arch with Grub in MBR, and then Ubuntu with grub installed in a partition. Not sure about sharing /home folder, but i'm sharing such folders like Music, Documents mounted inside /home folder. Also, swap is shared. Mine Arch is splitted into 3 partitions: /, /boot, /home.

p.s install lynx while installing & setting up Arch to be able to read wiki or google.

Last edited by funkypotatoe (2012-05-06 19:28:50)

snovik · 2012-05-06 19:54:28

Ok, if you do not mind lets do it step by step. I currently have 1 primary and 1 extended. Extended has only swap on it and ubuntu takes the whole primary. So I should:
1. Cut down current ubuntu partition to bare bones
2. For arch create both / and /boot as primary
3. Resize extended to available disk space
4. Create arch /home on extended
5. Create another partition on extended for music etc which will be mounted on both systems.
That makes 4 in total and should all work. Swap will be shared as well. So extended will have 3 partitions (swap, /home for arch and one for shared stuff)

Or shall I just use arch /home for music etc and mount it in ubuntu without another partition? Makes more sense to me

funkypotatoe · 2012-05-06 21:33:22

Do you want to keep current Ubuntu ? I have a tiny primary /boot partition as primary, and the rest is extended. Shared folder is much easier to keep on a separate partition imo.

fantab · 2012-05-07 04:20:05

I dual boot Arch and Ubuntu. And this is how I go about it.

15-20 gb primary "/" Arch
15-20 gb primary "/" Ubuntu
Extended (All remaining space)
Linux Partition ext4 (to store and share data between the Arch and Ubuntu).
SWAP 4-8 gb

I neither use /boot or /home...
But if you have UEFI then you may need /boot, for ordinary BIOS you don't need seperate /boot. If you want separate /boot then go for it.

Not having separate /home makes it easy to upgrade or reinstall without worrying about Data loss.

I save all my DATA on Linux Partition and share it between Arch and Ubuntu. I manually mount this Linux Partition at each system start or boot. We can automount it, I don't.

my two cents...

snovik · 2012-05-07 06:03:18

fantab wrote:

Not having separate /home makes it easy to upgrade or reinstall without worrying about Data loss.

Why is that? I thought the opposite is true.

And I guess I do not have UEFI (first time I heard about such thing). Meaning I do not need /boot and can create swap as primary.

To sum up it looks like: 2 primary partitions for each OS, one primary for swap and either extended or another primary for shared files.

Last edited by snovik (2012-05-07 06:03:41)

fantab · 2012-05-07 08:42:19

Four Primary partitions is the maximum primarys you can have. But if in future you need another one it will be a limitation. So instead have two or three primary partitons and one Extended. Having SWAP as logical will be good and save you one primary.

Between separate /home and /linux... IMO /linux is a better choice. /home also stores your dot files (configuration files) so if you share /home between two distros there can be issues, also after upgrades or new installations again your dot files will be saved in same old /home that you would have preserved to save your data... again newer dot files can conflict with older dot files and cause problems. That is why I use separate /linux instead of /home. Without /home all dot files are stored in / partition.

I only back up dotthunderbird and restore it after new installation other dots are cleaned up.

I hope I've made myself clear.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-05-06 19:15:47

Partitioning disks in dual boot

#2 2012-05-06 19:25:51

Re: Partitioning disks in dual boot

#3 2012-05-06 19:54:28

Re: Partitioning disks in dual boot

#4 2012-05-06 21:33:22

Re: Partitioning disks in dual boot

#5 2012-05-07 04:20:05

Re: Partitioning disks in dual boot

#6 2012-05-07 06:03:18

Re: Partitioning disks in dual boot

#7 2012-05-07 08:42:19

Re: Partitioning disks in dual boot

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