Arch Linux

zephyrus17

Member

Registered: 2008-06-15

Posts: 323

Dual boot w/ Windows

My ordered 500Gb HD is coming tomorrow morning, so I thought I'd plan a good strategy for my filesystems. I'm currently running Arch + XP but made the serious mistake of making /home ext4, which means I can't use ext2fs or similar programs to access /home from XP. That means everytime I need to access data in Linux I have to reboot from XP. Urgh.

I was flirting on the idea of putting NTFS for C: for Windows, ext4 for "/" and NTFS for "/home", for /home to be a shared drive. Is this wise? I know NTFS is pretty looked down upon in the Linux world, but I wanted to run my Windows games from that shared folder as well as my documents and stuff. I've tried using ext2fs to access an ext3 /home from XP, but some games just wouldn't install properly.

So I'll give:
??Mb for /boot
10Gb for /
2Gb for /swap
rest for /home
10Gb for C: (Is that too little?)

I'm also thinking of having /boot as ext2. Does this have a significant impact on boot speeds? Or does it just save the space from journalling? What size for /boot would you suggest?

Are there any other wise suggestions? I want to try to streamline the whole thing as much as possible.

Last edited by zephyrus17 (2009-05-06 12:36:34)

mcmillan

Member

Registered: 2006-04-06

Posts: 737

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

I'm not sure how things will work with NTFS for /home (if it would work at all). You might try a setup similar to I have, which is smallish partitions for windows, /, and /home, and then I have a fat32 (made pre-stable NTFS write days) where I keep all my files that I want to share between OS. I cut down the /home since it pretty much just needs configuration files. To make navigating quicker from /home I made symbolic links in /home to the shared partition.

zephyrus17

Member

Registered: 2008-06-15

Posts: 323

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

fat32? isn't fragmentation and speed a problem? Not to mention the filesystem being really old?

Last edited by zephyrus17 (2009-05-06 22:45:49)

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

I believe the emphasis in mcmillan's post was put on having a small /home partition with a linux-native filesystem, not on the filesystem of the shared partition - NTFS indeed seems to be a better choice than FAT.

Last edited by lucke (2009-05-06 22:59:58)

zephyrus17

Member

Registered: 2008-06-15

Posts: 323

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

I agree with that. I was just curious why he suggested fat32 for the shared. I could just fall back to ext3 for the shared space. But some programs might not run well there. Or was those cases just a problem with my programs being corrupted in the first place?

mcmillan

Member

Registered: 2006-04-06

Posts: 737

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

I believe the emphasis in mcmillan's post was put on having a small /home partition with a linux-native filesystem

Exactly, like I said I set this up when linux write support in NTFS was just being introduced and fat32 was still the suggested way to share things between windows and linux, but if I were to set it up today I'd use NTFS. Sorry if that wasn't clear. But since you asked, the fragmentation hasn't been enough of a problem for me to feel like I need to reformat and copy things from back ups.

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

The way I understood it, mcmillan created this partition in the days when NTFS write support was shabby.

I've learnt empirically that some games won't install on a NFS share. I presume any stuff not deemed standard by Microsoft might be problematic when using Windows.

zephyrus17

Member

Registered: 2008-06-15

Posts: 323

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

All right, then. I'll try with the NTFS. And do you symlink everything or just the major files?

EDIT:
I've come up with a preliminary partitioning scheme. Any advice would be welcome:

---extended---
sda1 /boot 32Mb Ext2
sda2 /root 10Gb Ext4
sda3 /var 6Gb ReiserFS
sda4 /swap
sda5 /home 10Gb Ext4
---Primary---
sda6 /Shared_Space 450Gb NTFS
sda7 Windows 7 RC 30Gb NTFS

where sda 7, 6 are primary partitions and sda1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are logical in an extended partition. Does having a logical partition at the beginning reduce drive speed?

Last edited by zephyrus17 (2009-05-07 01:41:07)

mcmillan

Member

Registered: 2006-04-06

Posts: 737

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

I have sym links to the directory for the shared partition, and others directly to my music, pictures and work directories since I tend to go use those pretty frequently and other things more sporadically.

I'll admit I haven't thought much about partion postition and its effects on speen but I don't see anything too wrong about the partitioning, maybe the size of the windows 7 partion. I have about that size for my XP partion. I don't know if windows 7 will be needing much more - I suppose that depends on how much you plan on install there too. You might be able to cut down some from /var. Just to make sure you know, /root is the home directory for the root user, just / signifies the root partition.

zephyrus17

Member

Registered: 2008-06-15

Posts: 323

Re: Dual boot w/ Windows

Yeap. I know that. I've got it partitioned and installed, and a fresh W7 takes about 10Gb