Partition scheme and size for dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 with separate partitions for data and /home

Question

A slight twist on this relatively common question:

Clean 250GB drive, plan is to install Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 (Win7 first).

I want to have a separate /home(for 9.10) and DATA (for Win7) partitions.

How does this sound?

• 50GB Win7 boot/applications primary partition (NTFS)
• 20GB U9.10 boot primary partition (ext4)
• 10GB unused primary partition (in case I want to install another linux)
• 170GB Extended partition
  • 4GB swap (have 2GB ram)
  • 25GB logical partition for /home (ext3)
  • 141GB logical partition for win7 data, movies, documents, pictures etc, which I'll view from Ubuntu, as well(NTFS)

Now, size is not exactly 250GB so the last logical partition is only an aproximation, but other sizes are pretty exact.

Any other factors to take into consideration?

Answer 1

your partition table seems to me to be almost correct, but I would think about an LVM (it could seems tricky, but I assure you that it will worth the hassle of understanding and using it).

The main reason is: (personal free-thinking :D) "I think that 20 GB are really a lot for a / partition (if you're not planning to put a public web server or something that could fill up fast your hard drive), and that 25 GB for home are really a few; but what can I do if someday I'll run out of disk space in the root partition?". And here is where LVM comes in handy: you can take some MB/GB from your /home or from your unused partition and add'em to your root.

Also, I would split / (root) from /boot: the reason is that you can use an ext2 for your /boot and ext4 for your / (root). ReiserFS it's wonderful, and it's very fast and reliable with a great number of little files (and that's journaled too). Concerning the NTFS data partition, I would suggest you to mount it in /media/data, so to be easy reacheable from inside Ubuntu.

I hope to see what you will choose in the end: and I wish you best luck for your brave project of dual-booting Ubuntu Karmic and Win7 with such an eclectic partition table!

Regards