HDD partition layout

[masshuu]

i have 2 120 gig drives, drive 1 has been windows, drive 2 has been a junk drive.

Yesterday and today i have deleted/compressed about 90 gigs of it so it will all fit on drive 1.

My question is this:
i want to duel boot ubuntu with windows, but how sould i set up the second drive,

50/50 windows/linux or a 100% linux on that partition or something else?

any sugestions?

[HomerJ]

You can do it however you want. What I would recommend is:

/dev/hda1 - Windows drive C:/ (whole first hard disk)
/dev/hdb1 - Ubuntu /boot (about 128MB, ext2 filesystem)
/dev/hdb2 - Ubuntu swap (about 2x RAM)
/dev/hdb3 - Ubuntu / (ext3 filesystem)
/dev/hdb4 - Shared (FAT32 or NTFS)

The Ubuntu / partition could probably be fairly small, about 15 to 30 GB. It will hold all of your ubuntu software and configuration. I recommend ext3fs, but you can use reiserfs or something else if you like.

/boot only contains your kernel and bootloader configuration. It can be really small, or you can just store those on your / and not have a /boot. If you make it a seperate partition, use ext2.

The swap partition can be whatever size you want. Double the size of your RAM is usually recommended.

The shared partition should be the rest of the drive. Use FAT32 if you can (linux handles it better), but NTFS if FAT32 can't handle the size of the partition. It could be Windows D: and mounted wherever you want on Ubuntu, probably at /storage or /mnt/storage. You should make it so that it can be read and written by your normal user.

[Stormscape]

You don't really need your Swap partition that large. On Fedora Core 6 (last distro I used), I had a 512mb swap partition with 2.5gb of RAM. When you have large amounts of RAM your swap partition isn't used nearly as much as when you have 512mb of RAM or other smaller amounts.

FAT32 is really the best for a storage partition, as unless you do lots of movie editing or anything involving large amounts of space you don't usually need it over about 40-50gb.

[IonCannon218]

My old pc has ubuntu installed on it.

Partition Chart:

Drives
sda: 4.0 GB
sdb: 30 GB

Device | filesystem | size
/dev/sda1 | ext2 | 4GB
/dev/sdb1 | ext2 | 15GB
/dev/sdb5 | extended | 1GB
/dev/sdb6 | swap | 1GB

PC stats:
Pentium 3 550MHz
128MB RAM (that's why i have 1GB swap)
Manufacture date: 2000
NO INTERNET!! WAHH!!!!

Yeah i know this is sucky, but that is what my dad let me install linux on...