Partitioning Critique Wanted
 

I'm setting up some fresh systems, and looking for some feedback.

Here is what I'm thinking for partitioning:

machine 1 (Athlon XP2600+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro):
60GB: 30GB NTFS (winXP), 30GB NTFS (games, etc.)
40GB: 20GB FAT32(for sharing, /home?), 19GB EXT2, 1GB Linux Swap

machine 2(Celeron 300A(450), 128MB RAM, Voodoo3 2000):
40GB: 10GB FAT32 (win98), 10GB FAT32 (games, etc.), 20GB FAT32(for sharing, /home?)
8GB: 4GB EXT2 (distro), 4GB EXT2 (LinuxFromScratch), 256MB Linux Swap


On both machines, I'm setting aside 20GB for a FAT32 partion for sharing between Linux/Windows. I'm thinking about also mounting this for /home for easy access from windows. This is the part of my scheme I am most leery of.

I might still choose to break up the EXT2 partitions to finer granularity for /, /usr, /whatever.

Any problems?


Edited for puncutation.

Obviously way too much room for windows :)


Cheers,
Tink

The only bad thing i see in your partition is that there is way too much space for windos, if i were you i would give linux more room. :D

Alternatively, you could set up one machine (the Celeron) to dual boot XP and Win98, and the other machine (the Athlon) to dual boot Slackware and LFS.

As the others have said, I'd give Linux more space, and I'd cut back on the amount of swap on the first machine from 1G to 256Mg max. With that much RAM, chances of ever really needing swap decrease dramatically, and in the rare cases where it is needed, you certainly won't need an entire gig.

Overall though I think your proposals are sound, and you are making a good move by creating a separate partition for /home -- J.W.

Yeah, my windows runs just great on ten.

By just great I of course mean has enough room.

You can put /home on FAT, but you may have 'rpblems' with file permissions. Everything put on FAT seems to wind up with 755 permissions.
1GB of swap is lots unless you plan to do iso mastering or video/sound editing.

That's good to know, I think I'll cut the FAT32s for sharing in half, and give 10GB to /home on each machine.

Well, maybe I will :D

I guess I don't mind giving up a GB just in case. 1GB just doesn't seem like an unrealistic dataset anymore. I work on app servers which max out 4GB. Not at home, of course.

Hah ! I to a lot of gaming in Windows still. Doom3 being 1.5GB with compression, I'm gonna keep some room.

Thanks for all the input !

Re: Partitioning Critique Wanted
 

My personal guidelines:
1. If one system fails due to drive issues - other HAS to live.
2. If possible, put / and swap on separate drives.
3. Up to 4 partitions per drive - none of that extended partition shit
3. Since I can easily read ext2/3fs (explorefs) and reiserfs (rfs-something) from Windows, and, I can easily read NTFS from Linux, and both are MUCH more stable than FAT32 - ditch the dependency on FAT32.
4. If you spend a lot of time on Windows, keep your important data files on NTFS, not FAT.
(besides, since some files can run into 1+Gb (ie Xvid movies), your /home on FAT32 will die a painful death.)

Machine 1
a. I dont see a point in splitting 60Gig HD into 30 and 30. What is the point of separate game partition? There is only one reason why I would put the games on a separate DRIVE. Less physical stress on the System drive. But in your case - it is the same drive.

b. I would set up the the 60 gig drive:
/dev/hdX1 - 20-30 Gig of NTFS for WinXP - system drive - all progs/games go there.
/dev/hdX2 - the rest 30-40 NTFS for Windows "/home" (Use TweakUI to relocate/point your home folders (MyDocs/Music/Photos) to this drive.) I would expect a shitload of mp3s and movies to live here. (You dont need to write to them from Linux, dontcha?)
/dev/hdX3 - some 500-1000Mb for linux swap.

c. I would set up the linux part. table on the 40 gig drive in a classical way:
/dev/hdZ1 - no more than 128Mb - ext2 - /boot - mount as read only.
/dev/hdZ2 - about 20 gig - ext3/reiserfs - /
/dev/hdZ3 - the rest ~20 gig - reiserfs - /home
/dev/hdZ4 - some 500-1000 Mb - FAT32 - for FILES you really need RW access to. (Like iCal calendar files (Mozilla Cal in Win/Korganizer in KDE), shared mail stacks)