Partition advice?

Thompz · 2008-02-11 23:08:36

Been messing around in virtualbox and now going to set arch up for real on my new comp. Any ideas on how to partition it?

I have a 500gb hard drive and need a vista partition and arch partition, possibly mac OSX too. Is something like having 50GB for the vista/50gb for arch/50gb for mac OS files and then a big 350gb partition for everything else, maybe split 150/75/75?

Anyone triple boot? Not sure about macOSX as it seem a lot of effort for something unstable.

SpookyET · 2008-02-12 01:23:54

/boot       primary        50MiB
/swap      extended      2x RAM
/              extended      10GiB
/home     extended       as much as you want (it takes my entire drive)

Thoe are the partitions you truly need. You can go more /tmp /var /usr /usr/local /opt etc. But, those are not needed for a desktop.

gorn · 2008-02-12 01:27:02

I originally had:
Gentoo Linux
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Mac

I ran out of space on XP.
I never used Mac (bad hardware support, and I already have a Mac anyway)
I never used Vista (bad software support and I already had XP anyway)
And I wanted to play with ArchLinux
So I changed it up. Expanded XP. Deleted Vista. Deleted Mac.
I gave ArchLinux "/" only 20GB because that was all I could afford to without rearranging (and formatting) partitions. But that's enough for now, and I'll expand over gentoo's "/" when ready. Having a seperate /home partition is nice.

The issue with a big 350GB partition for everything else is that it most likely will be ntfs or fat32, which don't handle unix permissions. Since I primarily use Linux I made /home my biggest partition. If I'm in Windows and really need something from /home I do have to reboot, but Linux can copy files to/from the Window partition.

With that all said. 50GB for an Arch install is plenty, but It might be a bit low for Windows + Program Files.
Back to linux, the only issue is your /home. If you manage things well you could have your documents all on the big shared partition and just deal with the lack of permissions.
Mac on non-mac hardware is overrated. You can also try it on vmware but it's crappy there too. If you like tinkering though then make sure you setup the partition for it, as it must be a primary partition, not logical. Also if you decide you don't use it, you'd have that partition for XP or another linux or whatever.

Also vista's boot manager is a pain in the ass and very very fragile. But it is easy to restore from the Vista CD.

Edit: In response to the other post. I'd say 10GB is a bit low for a / partition. I'm at 9GB and I've only been using Arch for a week. Granted I have a lot of big software installed (Matlab, Vmware, OpenOffice)

Last edited by gorn (2008-02-12 01:28:36)

thayer · 2008-02-12 04:00:33

For more ideas, have a look at this current thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=42862

Arch Linux

#1 2008-02-11 23:08:36

Partition advice?

#2 2008-02-12 01:23:54

Re: Partition advice?

#3 2008-02-12 01:27:02

Re: Partition advice?

#4 2008-02-12 04:00:33

Re: Partition advice?

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