Partition help
 

I'm going reformat my hd soon, and I need some help/advice on my partition scheme. I'm going to have 1 extended partiton at the beginning of the drive, and then windows at the end of the drive.

http://i34.tinypic.com/2i9icf4.png

Will that work out well?

It may, but it also may save you some headaches with the windows bootloader if you put the windows partition at the beginning of the drive. Thats not to say that its impossible with the layout you have, but just maybe more tricky.

If I was going to do it, PERSONALLY I would do it like this

[Windows] [/boot] [swap] [Extended: [/] [/home] ]

I would like to see the story that goes with that picture. Windows is probably on the first partition, as far as I know windows has to be put on a primary partition to boot. It shows two extended partitions in the center of the picture and I presume the rest is primaries. Most of the newer distros will partition the hd without any worries. I have personal preferences that a lot of people do not agree with. All my windows and dos are on primary partitions and linux on extended.

Yes.

Nope. There's only one extended partition (there can be only one), and it's at the end. Inside it you see two logical units.

So, that layout has three primary partitions (nothing wrong in that), for windows, swap and boot. And one extended partition at the end. Inside the extended partition you can create up to 59 (64 - <the device node> - 4 primary/extended partitions) logical drives .I think that the number might be lower if the drive uses a SCSI driver (i.e. SATA or usb drives).

There's no other way. Windows requires a primary partition, and it also requires it to be set as bootable (idiotic, since that's just a flag), it's just yet another way to let us know that Windows should be the only OS on your machine.

Linux doesn't care about that things, which is very convenient.

Sorry for writing extended for logical, mind somewhere else I guess.

It's definitely possible to partition as you've indicated, but it probably would be easier to put Windows in the first partition on the primary master. (If you install Windows, that's where it wants/expects to be -- there are workarounds but it's probably a timesaver to let Windows do what it wants)

Overall though, you can partition your drive pretty much the way you want

Thanks for all the advice! I think I'll just have windows first, like drewbug01 said.