Your post also begs the question of whether or not it may make sense to reorganize your disk and set up a few partitions for specific use. If you really are intent on getting rid of Windows, congratulations, though my recommendation would be to back up what you had there, and also keep a "recovery disk" or CD that may have come with your system. Too many times I have heard of people who intended to say Goodbye to Windows, then later had some reason to come back - maybe even to try things out, such as showing newcomers how Windows and Linux can co-exist, or maybe running that one last application that you liked. Either way, with a small investment, you can make sure to at least allow that possibility, should the need ever arise. At the same time, I congratulate you on your choice! I have to use XP at work, and I have a copy at home, too, which I use a couple of hours a week in order to access FrontPage XP, but other than that, I run MANY Linux distros all the time.
I keep a single swap partition and share it among all of the distros. I did not use to make it very large because I like to avoid swap and run apps from memory instead of paging or swapping, as much as I can, but a swap partition is a good safety net, plus it enables you to use Hibernate and Suspend functions, which save power, but allow you to come up quickly after being away.
Therefore, if you are able, first back up everything you had.
Then, if you are willing, scrap even your Linux stuff and reorganize. You may want to create a specific partition for /home. Then when you reinstall or upgrade systems, /home need not get affected, it merely needs to be mounted following an installation. You may optionally also want to create one or more separate data partitions, such as /data, or /data1, etc., but as long as you have /home you can always store things there. If you intend to save a lot of media content, make the place where you are saving it the largest that you can.
You can probably get away with as little as 5 GB for your / partition, providing that you have /home somewhere else, but that leaves very little head room for growth, especially on larger distributions. 10 GB ought to be plenty, given that you are using separate /home and/or /data partitions, but if you want this to scale for years, perhaps even 20 GB might be worth it. My guess is that anything larger than that, you are likely to want to replace the system before all of that gets eaten up, unless you are a total software pack rat!
Let's say you have a 160 GB disk. How about carving it up this way?
1. /dev/sda1 - 10 GB for your primary OS.
2. /dev/sda2 - another 10 GB for another OS, maybe one to experiment with.
3. /dev/sda3 - 2 GB for swap - make it double memory if you can, so with 2 GB memory, make it 4 GB.
4. /dev/sda4 - Extended partition - make this take up the rest of the disk.
5. /dev/sda5 - /home - ext3 logical partition within the extended partition. If you want to have only a /home, then I suppose you do not even need an extended partition, just make /home be the rest of /dev/sda4. But if you want to divide the disk up more, such as the use of /data partitions, and maybe separate /var or /tmp partitions, then create the extended partition and then make a series of logical partitions, starting with 5. I'd make /home at least 80 GB unless you store your media stuff on one of those data partitions. In that case, make /home 20 GB and make those data partitions huge.
cfdisk is a great tool to carve up disk partitions. You can read about it at
http://manual.sidux.com/en/part-cfdisk-en.htm
Format Windows partition
