Linux Duel Boot question's

willy-wilson

Im thinking about partitioning my hard drive and installing linux mint on one partition windows 7 on another and one partition for my music, pictures, and data. but i have a few questions im wanting to do this with my laptop and it only has a 250gb hard drive. but im wondering how much room i should have for the windows and linux partitions obviously i would like to keep most room open for data but i want enough room in the windows and linux partitions to keep them running smoothly. does anyone know how much room i should leave for each? Thanks in advance for any help.

DrunkShaman

After reading your post 3 times.

Do you mean you want to divide 250GB in to 3 parts?

Have no idea if one is using 250GB.

100GB for windows 100GB for linux and rest for your other stuff I suppose?
Dont go on my word please.

Ben Apuna

I personally wouldn't recommend partitioning it 3 ways. 250GB is awfully small, unless you really REALLY do not play any games. Even high res Mudbox sculpts and large PSDs can add up fast.

I made my Vista partition 75GB and regret it a lot. I've got lot's of room for data but not much for apps/games... I doubt Windows 7 is any smaller of an install than Vista.

Out of curiosity, what do you plan to do with Linux anyway? It's a small install, but from what little I know there really isn't much that runs (well) on it.

jrs100000

Most likely you could get away with a much smaller Linux partition. Its a very small install, your not going to be playing any large games on that side, and all of your large files are going to be on the third partition, so maybe something like 110 Win 110 storage 30 Linux would do it.

Xenobond

You can work from two partitions and shrink/expand one or the other depending on your needs. Both win7 & linux distros have tools that do this.

Ark

Xenobond wrote: »

You can work from two partitions and shrink/expand one or the other depending on your needs. Both win7 & linux distros have tools that do this.

Tried this earlier this month and it made my windows 7 take about 5 minutes too load into windows. Not saying its the tool, but id recommend something like partition magic.

notman

If you've been using Windows 7 for a bit now, then look at how much space you're using currently. Add 10 or so gigs to that, and use that for your Windows partition. The thing to remember with Windows, is it uses virtual memory, so you want to leave space for that, along with future programs.

For linux, I'd say 50G. It could be much smaller, but if you haven't used linux before, you'll probably want to try programs, and that will fill up a drive quickly. Linux by itself, doesn't take too much space though. 30G is probably the smallest I'd go with that.

bearkub

I think the big missing piece here is what do you intend to do with the Linux install? If you just want a linux install to "tinker" with, you can put a Linux install on a USB disc and not have to lose anything on your primary drive or worry about anything happening. I have had Windows and grub (Linux boot loader) not play very nice together and eventually leaving me with an unbootable system.

I can't believe I am about to say this, but in this day and age, a 250gig drive is just a little small for a dual boot system, especially when you are talking about Windows 7 as one of the OS's.

If you really want to do the dual boot off the 250 gig drive, I would do what notman suggested and find out how much you currently use in your windows install now; apps and all, and go from there.

willy-wilson

yea, i just decided to install linux mint on my old computer and leave this one alone. i do agree 250gb is very small and i badly need a external hdd for storage im useing about half of it right now but thats only because i just reformated again and all the data is and stuff other than apps and music, tf2 and stuff are on dvd's and usb drives.

oXYnary

There is a tool for Win 7 that adds Linux partitions to its boots menu, forget the name. Anyhow, some versions of Linux will run off a ntfs file system, so you could in theory use the same. or your programs partition to also host your linux. The only real partition you would need for Linux then would be one just for the swap.

onnod

Why not try Linux on WUBI, or in a virtual machine first before you partition? If you go the vm route, VirtualBox can use dynamically resizing partitions, so it will never take up more space than it needs. I have used both, so if you have any questions, just shoot.

And, of course, there is always Cygwin.

notman

I agree with Bearkub's idea. I forgot about the USB linux setups. My assumption is that you're going to be playing with linux for now, and that's why I think you're going to want plenty of space to install/try applications.

Bearkub: Yeah, I remember when my 40MB drive was huge (and yes, I mean megabyte)

ima

I usually keep windows on one partition that's really small and then have a 2nd one for files, leaving the windows partition alone.
I believe linux allows you to mount the same partitions as windows, so you could probably have 2 really small partitions for the OSes and one big partition for the files?
Don't know if there are any stability issues this way, but it's just an idea. You could have two folder in the root directory of the big partition called "Windows" and "Linux".
Please check to see if there are any stability issues with this first, or you could lose data.