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What is your partition set up?

post #1 of 44
8/23/03 at 11:21pm
Thread Starter 
Hello:

In anticipation of the arrival of my 5680 (hopefully) next week, I am starting to think about breaking up the 60gig hard drive.

For now, I am going to have just XP running, but in a few months when I finish my first term and start Co-op, I will start fooling around with Linux. As of right now, here are my thoughts:

C: 10~15gig NTFS for WinXP and all essential software
D: 35~40gig FAT32 for other programs and data
E: The remaining space, temporarily formatted with FAT32, for Linux in the future.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is 35gigs too much for FAT32? I would like to hear what partition configurations you guys have (and why you chose them).

Thanks a lot.

Mikhail
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post #2 of 44
8/24/03 at 1:22am
What I've done on my old laptop, and will probably do on the sager I eventually order is like this:

1st Primary 25Megs Linux /boot mount
2nd Primary 40Gigs WinXP
3rd Primary ~19Gigs Mandrake Linux

You can have up to 4 primary partitions if you create them with the linux installer or 3rd party utility. The reason I put the linux boot partition first is because in the past there have been problems booting to partitions past the 1024 cylinder of the hard drive, they may have fixed that by now, I don't know. Unfortunately all this means you will probably have to install linux first to get this configuration, and after you install windows you may need to use fdisk to set the active partition back to the linux boot partition. Good luck
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post #3 of 44
8/24/03 at 5:01am
3 gigs (NTFS) just for windows
15 gigs (NTFS) for programs
32 gigs (FAT32) for data
10 gigs for linux
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post #4 of 44
8/24/03 at 9:00am
Good question.

In the past I have partitioned as follows:

4 GB - OS
2 GB - Swap
10 GB - Programs
10 GB - Company data
10 GB - Games
? GB - Data (whatever is left)

I would like to put the swap partition first because it would be on the first part of the drive which is the fastest. I need to have a 2 GB swap file for one of the programs that I run. Is it possible to put the swap partiton first? Does WXP Pro need to be installed on the first so many sectors of the drive? I have successfully installed RH9.0 on the end of my current drive, but I have not tried installing WXP on anything but the first partition.

Any ideas/comments?
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post #5 of 44
8/24/03 at 12:48pm
Thread Starter 
Interesting config's.

A few things:

1) I want to have both data and programs on a single large partition so I could balance between data (incl. downloads) and programs as I wish, without being tied down to small partitions.

2) I've heard about the 1024 cylinder thing, but a friend of mine who recently put Gentoo on his laptop, said that the problem is gone.

3) obg, why would you make a tiny partition for the swap? Its the same drive anyway. The only advantage I can see is that only that little guy would fragment.

4) No one has yet answered if a 35gig partition is too much for FAT32.


Thanks, and keep the info coming!

Mikhail
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post #6 of 44
8/24/03 at 1:04pm
Drive C:
10 GB C: NTFS (system)
15 GB D: NTFS (data)
31 GB E: NTFS (scrap/NLE scratch disk)

Drive F:
60 GB unformatted/empty

I am waiting to install the Platinum Linux Install package I ordered from powernotebooks on the second HD... I may give some of that over to a FAT32 data partition to share between WinXP and Mandrake.... dunno yet.

Would like to have more scrap disk space also, so that could happen, too.

-myrkat
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post #7 of 44
8/24/03 at 1:07pm
Quote:
Originally posted by mmarkin
Interesting config's.

A few things:

1) I want to have both data and programs on a single large partition so I could balance between data (incl. downloads) and programs as I wish, without being tied down to small partitions.

2) I've heard about the 1024 cylinder thing, but a friend of mine who recently put Gentoo on his laptop, said that the problem is gone.

3) obg, why would you make a tiny partition for the swap? Its the same drive anyway. The only advantage I can see is that only that little guy would fragment.

4) No one has yet answered if a 35gig partition is too much for FAT32.


Thanks, and keep the info coming!

Mikhail
First, I think FAT32 supports up to 2 Terabytes or something like that. I have always used relatively small (10-15GB) partitions in the past for performance and organization. Is there no longer a performance advantage to smaller partitions? I thought it mainly had to do with the cluster size? I have a seperate swap partition set up on all of my computers for the same reasons above. I have not had any problems with fragmentation and the defrag program I use will defrag a swap file. It seems if you create a swap file on a partition with other data it never creates a contigous file even if there is plenty of room to do so. Creating a partition for it keeps the file in one spot on the drive and I would like to make it the first on the drive for better performance. I think NT had the 1024 cylinder (2GB) boot limit. I thought that W2000 and WXP was more like 8GB which would work out great for me. Let me know your thought/comments on this and above.
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post #8 of 44
8/24/03 at 1:09pm
Thread Starter 
Cool; What I meant by the FAT32 limitation is the performance limitation. When you take bigger partitions/drives, the file system becomes very wasteful. The thing I want to know is the size threshold after which it gest bad.

Mikhail
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post #9 of 44
8/24/03 at 1:14pm
Quote:
Originally posted by mmarkin
Cool; What I menat by the FAT32 limitation is the performance limitation. When you take bigger partitions/drives, the file system becomes very wasteful. The thing I want to know is the size threshold after which it gest bad.

Mikhail

Hmmm, I'm not sure about that. I'd be interested in knowing the best size for each file system relative to performance.
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post #10 of 44
8/24/03 at 1:30pm
Basically, FAT32 really gets wasteful after only 5 or 10 GB (sadly, enough) when using the default cluster size.

Microsoft definitely recommends NTFS for partitions larger than 32 GB - so much so, that WinXP doesn't format FAT partitions above that size (go ahead, try it!).

However, with smaller sizes, FAT is likely to be more efficient — certainly below 4 GB, and probably below 8 GB. But NTFS should be used for partitions >16 GB, since FAT 32 cluster size goes up to 16 KB... and higher as one moves up in size.

Now there are (or were, with win9x) hidden switches in the FORMAT comand that forced a particular cluster size (I remember trying the minimum 512byte - like NTFS has). However, the filesystem becomes INCREDIBLY inefficient. That 512byte FAT32 experiment I did caused HUGE overhead in resources as well as very SLOW read/writes to the disk. Basically, because of all the extra management that went on.

Personally, I only have NTFS for windows partitions. I'm only thinking of having some FAT32 as a common share when I dual-boot linux & windows. I do not care about wasted space inefficiencies as I have 120GB total space on my laptop and much more than that on my family server.

-myrkat
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post #11 of 44
8/24/03 at 1:36pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally posted by myrkat
Personally, I only have NTFS for windows partitions. I'm only thinking of having some FAT32 as a common share when I dual-boot linux & windows.
Makes sense to me.
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post #12 of 44
8/24/03 at 2:02pm
I've always included a FAT32 5GB partition for ghost images. I know CDs are possible, but most of the time I miss place those same CDs.

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post #13 of 44
8/24/03 at 2:41pm
Quote:
Originally posted by myrkat

Personally, I only have NTFS for windows partitions. I'm only thinking of having some FAT32 as a common share when I dual-boot linux & windows. I do not care about wasted space inefficiencies as I have 120GB total space on my laptop and much more than that on my family server.

-myrkat
Linux can't read NTFS partitions? That will change the way I wanted to set up my 8890. I've never used linux but I'm going to try it out soon.
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post #14 of 44
8/24/03 at 3:21pm
my 8890 will come with 2 60 gig hard drives with raid-0. should i make partitions or just leave it as a single 120gb hard drive? will i see any performance differences if i decide to partition or not?
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post #15 of 44
8/25/03 at 2:43am
Does anyone know of a way to get Linux (Mandrake, my favorite) to actually read NTFS partitions? I always have:

10gig System (NTFS)
10gig Programs (NTFS)
35gig Data (NTFS)
5gig Linux

and it would be GREAT if I could easily share data between the two OS's. On another note, I usually install the Windows BEFORE the Linux since LILO gives me less problems then that damn windows boot loader.
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post #16 of 44
8/25/03 at 3:05am

NTFS

I was talking a Linux freak (it's a compliment) I know and he was saying that there is actually a way to mount NTFS drives so you can read NTFS in Linux, but you can't write. I really can't confirm this, since the only people I know use Jaguar or XP, and have a hard time using those.

Samurai182
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post #17 of 44
8/25/03 at 9:41am
This is what I'm gonna do with my 60Gb HDD.

5Gb (NTFS) Win XP
45Gb (NTFS) Programs
10Gb (NTFS) Misc

Only gonna use WinXP.
Would like to know if its ideal (if there is even an ideal way of partitioning a HDD....)
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post #18 of 44
8/25/03 at 10:33am
Yes you can mount NTFS partitions in linux. The kernel support is somewhat experimental, and enabling write support is not recommended. If you wish share partitions, I would suggest using FAT32 partitions instead for windows.
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post #19 of 44
8/25/03 at 11:29am
You can mount NTFS and there's even a half-ass, super-risky way to WRITE to NTFS under linux (though no one advises it).

That's why most people just FAT32 a common partition for shared data. All OS's can read/write FAT/FAT32, basically.

-myrkat
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post #20 of 44
8/25/03 at 12:00pm
Alright, so here's my partition scheme for my 80 GB hdd.

55 GB for Windows XP Pro formatted NTFS
8 GB for Linux (512 MB is for swap) formatted prolly ext3 or ReiserFS (not sure which distro I'll use)
13 GB for Inter-OS file storage
4 GB for distribution between those other three, or possibly FreeBSD, Win98se, or Darwin.

Can Win98se function while hyperthreading is on? I know it won't recognize the emulated CPU, but will it still work?

I think that it's useless to put programs for Windows XP on a separate partition because if the OS partition crashes and you have to reinstall it, you'll still have to reinstall all the programs due to the loss of the registry (unless you backed it up but that's not terribly safe).

Here's another question: what is the best way to partition a hard drive? is WinXP's formatting utility enough to do all the above? What order should I install the OSes? I've read that WinXP should be installed first followed by Linux. Should I spend the $$$ on PartitionMagic?
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