On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, Troy Dawson wrote:

> Adam Timol wrote:
>>  I'd like to make a dual boot linux/XP machine, given I have just the one
>>  HDD in my computer, what is the ideal partitioning configuration I should
>>  make when installing the first OS (winXP)?
>>
>>  set up:4Gigs RAM, 64bit AMD, 80G HDD, Saphire 2600XT
>>
>>  Adam
>> 
>
> Hi Adam,
> That is a difficult question to ask other people, because it all depends on 
> what you want, and on your personal preferences.  But, here's my 2 cents 
> worth.
>
> I only give 2Gig for swap.  This is because if you've got something that has 
> used all 4 Gig of your memeory, and then 2 Gig of swap, you have problems.
>
> I like to just give all my linux disk to /.  I don't make a /home paritition. 
> That is just a personal preference.  I prefer to save any data off, then wipe 
> my home area when I do a fresh install.  But I understand reason's for having 
> a /home partition.
>
> ** Personally, I would want a partition that both Windows and Linux can write 
> to without problem, and then an equal size for both windows and linux.  So, 
> this is what I would do on my machine.
> hda1 - Windows partition - 34 Gig
> hda2 - Dos partition - 10 Gig
> hda3 - Extended Partition
> hda5 - / (linux root partition) - 34 Gig
> hda6 - linux swap partition - 2 Gig

With recent systems pushing LVM you can (fairly easily) resize things on 
the fly.  Ignoring the windows/dos parts you need one partition for /boot 
and another for a PV covering the rest of the disk.  So that would result 
in something like:

hda1 - windows 34 g
hda2 - dos shared (vfat) - 10 g
hda3 - /boot (100-200M)
hda4 - PV (rest of disk)

and then you can set up the VG and arrange the LVs inside to be how you 
want.  Personally I'm a bit traditional so we will have seperate LVs for 
/, /usr, /var, /tmp, swap and most of the rest as a 'scratch' area and a 
bit of free space in the VG - because growing a PV is much easier/quicker 
than shrinking one.

At work I use different mount options for /, /tmp, /usr, /var, but on my 
home machines/laptop I don't bother so much since I trust myself :-)

For historical reasons I still set the swap size at about ~1.5x memory 
though that does seem like overkill on a 24G machine... :-)

[ bigger swap spaces can be handy if you want to use some of the suspend 
to disk stuff though ]

  -- Jon