Advice: Choice between 2 partitioning/dualboot schemes

shrimants · 2010-11-17 02:07:36

500gb HDD, reported size ~465gb. Dual booting with XP 32 and Arch64

Option 1:
100gb for XP, rest of the disk is ext4 with a 1 or 2 gig swap at the end.

Option 2:
100gb for XP, big chunk of NTFS for all shared media (documents, music, movies, pictures), 50gb ext4 partition for linux, 1-2 gig swap.

Option 3:
???

Explanation:
Basically I want to be able to seamlessly access my files and folders no matter what happens. Some things are easier from XP to do on a whim, and obviously there are quite a few programs that I like to be able to use that are windows only. Most of the issue is with speed in the event of a problem. Example: my gf and I wanted to watch a movie on my big screen and i wanted to output via svideo. I hadnt bothered setting up any x.org profiles or putting in an entry for it in my xorg.conf. I tried mucking about with nvidia's settings to no avail, the dual screen option was constantly screwing up and drawing windows where there was no screen space. If i had that windows partitoin sitting around, i could just copy the file over and use windows for my 1.5 hours or so and call it a day.

Another example: printing documents is a pain in the ass. My printer has, for some reason, a very finicky time in linux. ive tried for a few months to figure it out but to no avail. half the times i need to print i have to copy my file over to a usb drive, go to a windows laptop, and print from there.

So I'm wondering, should I try this NTFS method to keep everything seamless no matter what OS im using or should I just do option 1 considering I end up using linux reliably for all but about 5% of the time? Keep in mind that I treat linux as my "project" OS, and mess around with everything a LOT just for sh*ts and giggles, so I definately like the comfort of having XP as a plan C or D.

Mikus01 · 2010-11-17 03:12:09

My take on this issue is always having small ext4 partitions for Linux and big NTFS ones for Windows. That way I can access data on both Operative Systems without problems. When dealing with speed you want to keep your boot files and binaries under an ext4/ReiserFS/AnythingButNTFS partition, however i.m.h.o, unless you're dealing with huge amounts of data, having NTFS partitions for storage won't impact your performance.

Proofrific · 2010-11-17 07:16:05

Given that Linux is your "project" OS, and messing around may result in a reinstall, I'd say put all your files in an NTFS partition (Option #1). That way, you don't have to worry about restoring your personal files when reinstalling Linux.

Just to make sure, do you back up your data? Please say "yes."

stqn · 2010-11-18 00:18:02

In my experience,
- 16GB is plenty for Windows XP (excluding games installs),
- 20GB should be good for Arch (I've had a 12GB root partition for 8 months and just increased it to 20GB yesterday, but I actually plan to use less than 10GB of it on my new computer because I don't need to build kernels anymore and plan to backup pacman cache pkgs to another drive.)
- NTFS is fine for stuff like music and video and probably anything else (except Linux programs.)
- Swap is useless under Linux if you have 1GB of ram or more (or even 512MB if you're using a light DE.)

Edit: Maybe swap is not so useless in fact, since yesterday meld (a graphical diff tool) made the OOM killer kill all my programs when it used 1.5GB of RAM for comparing two directories... But then it depends on what programs you want to run.

Don't think too much about it anyway, since with gparted you can easily resize partitions (both NTFS and ext4.)

Last edited by stqn (2010-11-18 00:25:44)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-11-17 02:07:36

Advice: Choice between 2 partitioning/dualboot schemes

#2 2010-11-17 03:12:09

Re: Advice: Choice between 2 partitioning/dualboot schemes

#3 2010-11-17 07:16:05

Re: Advice: Choice between 2 partitioning/dualboot schemes

#4 2010-11-18 00:18:02

Re: Advice: Choice between 2 partitioning/dualboot schemes

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