Arch Linux

bloodytanga

Member

Registered: 2011-05-05

Posts: 1

Partitioning for dual boot with W7

Hi, I've been a user of Arch for about year an a half now but tomorrow or the day after tomorrow thy're giving me a new PC with good hard and preinstalled original licensed windows 7 so I've decided that I will keep Windows Se7en for playing some games and Syncing mi iPod with iTunes and nothing more. But I've never partitioned for dual boot, just for simple boot for Arch. My question is this. The computer will come with two partitions probably, one of 100 Mb for the recovery files for Windows and the other partition with windows. Am I going to be able to resize that partition from the cfdisk? Or should I do it from the Disk Administrator on Windows? And now the question about the partitions itself. I'm going to have sda1 and sda2 with the windows stuff and NTFS files system so I should create sda3 with the "/" folder using ext4, there's where arch is installed right? I'm thinking about leaving 50 Gb for that folder just in case and then I'm planning on creating a FAT32 partition for my personal files like videos, music, etc. Is this alright or am I missing something?

The partition map:
sda1 100MB "Windows 7 Recovery Files" (NTFS)
sda2 100GB "Windows 7"                          (NTFS)
sda3 50GB "/" where arch is installed       (ext4)
sda5 rest of HDD for peronal files             (FAT32)

Please answer as many of my questions as you can cause I don't want to mess things up.

Thanx for your support ^.^

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,774

Re: Partitioning for dual boot with W7

gparted does a pretty good job of shrinking NTFS partitions.  YMMV. 

Back up everything important first (not a problem on a fresh system). 
Make sure you don't damage the recovery partition -- just in case.
If it is an option, create your DVD restore disks first (My HP DV4 restore disks fit conveniently on 10 Single Side DVDs [ ouch ])

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Fetid Frog

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2010-04-16

Posts: 24

Re: Partitioning for dual boot with W7

Before spending time copying your personal files to the partition you will create, boot windows and check that you can read/write to that partition -- sometimes windows doesn't like partitions it didn't create.  You can reformat the partition in windows if this happens (this will lose any data on the partition).

Another thing you should consider is the BIOS clock.  It can be set to UTC (preferred) or localtime (default for windows).  If you set it to UTC (during Arch install) you will have to set it to UTC in windows too, which can only be done by editing the windows registry (as far as I know).  If you set it to localtime you won't have to change it in windows, but you may find the clock is wrong after your time zone goes to/from daylight saving time (there were some recent changes regarding this in Arch, so I don't know if it is a problem any more -- I use UTC).

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,774

Re: Partitioning for dual boot with W7

sda5 rest of HDD for peronal files             (FAT32)

I missed that.  I think this is a poor file system choice for either OS.  I would suggest splitting that between a ext3 or 4 volume that Windows is not allowed to touch, and a smaller fat32 file system that can be mounted on both.  That way, your files in /home are not exposed to the Windows and its known  vulnerabilities.

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Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
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tooke

Member

Registered: 2011-02-13

Posts: 9

Re: Partitioning for dual boot with W7

I agree that gparted is the way to go. I always try to do things from the command line when I can, but I still use gparted. I recommend downloading the gparted live cd and burning it to a disk, I always use it when I'm setting up new systems.

As for partition layout, I also agree with ewaller on the FAT thing. What I've done in the past is set up a separate NTFS partition to hold all my data, which can then be accessed by both operating systems. Then in Linux I'd set it up so fstab would mount it to /mnt/data, then I'd have a symlink at /home/user/data pointing to /mnt/data.
If you keep all your data on this, you can also reduce the size of the other two partitions, since they won't need as much space. If you go this route, the layout might look something like this:

sda1 100MB "Windows 7 Recovery Files"  (NTFS)
sda2 30GB "Windows 7"                           (NTFS)
sda3 15GB "/" where arch is installed      (ext4)
sda4 rest of HDD for personal files          (NTFS)

I don't know how much space windows 7 takes up, but I've always done 30GB for XP/Vista. Also, make sure you have ntfs-3g installed in arch if you do this, since you'll need it to be able to write to NTFS partitions.

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