i would like to know how to partition my harddrive to have the best performance in window xp and redhat9 linux in my 60gb harddriver.

i know it's best to have the swap partition positioned in the inner side of the disk coz reading that location is faster then outter location.

this is my plan of partition:
hda1= 10GB windows NTFS
hda2= 10GB for data and download files NTFS
hda3= 20GB for mp3s NTFS
hda4= 1GB swap
hda5= 200mb /boot ext3
hda6= the rest ext3

is this the best way.?
(i've tried this arragement b4 but lauching and switching from one application to another one seems much slower then xp. is this normal?)

many times installing linux and partitioned my last 10GB section of hardriver using the default tools provided by redhat9 and create 1GB swap partition first and it shows in the partition table "hda9 1GB swap" then at the bottom of it shows unused partition. then i create 100mb /boot partition it shows hda9 is /boot and hd10 is swap. after creating all the neccessary partition to install linux the partition table shows that hda9 is /boot, hda10 swap and hda11 is /

i'm trying to make swap at hda9 since swap partition is best places in the inner side of the disk. how am i make the swap partition being placed at hda9?

i wanted to use window for 3d and dreamweaver.
i want to learn linux and using for surfing and wordprocessing.

You may want to add a small partition to swap files between XP and Linux. You can't write to NTFS from linux or to Linux from XP. You should make it fat32 because both OS's can read/write to that.

Just a thought.

The SWAP partition can only be used by Linux, so you do not need to put it in the middle of the HDD.
Here is an example of a Linux partition table.
/boot
/
SWAP
/home

The /boot partition should be no more than 75MB. The reason why RedHat makes it over 100MB is simply because many users forget to un-install old kernels after performing an upgrade.

The SWAP partition should be 256MB to 512MB. If you create a SWAP partition over 512MB, you are wasting space.
My philosophy behind this reasoning is: If my system uses more than 256MB of swap, I need more RAM.

I suggest a /home because if you ever want to perform a clean install, you can copy your configuration files over to the /home partition.

The swap I was talking about is not for "swap memory" but to be able to transfer files/data from one OS to the other. Sorry, I should have been clearer. I guess I should call that "file sharing" partition.

Since Linux can't write to XP I usually suggest that so that they won't have to download twice or burn to a CD just to be able to swap files. Writing to XP is very risky from what I have read.

Hope that clears that up.

That's why you just need a FAT32 partition for swapping files with the OSes.

Both Operating systems can write to Fat32.

Voila.

It shouldn't matter all that much which partition it's placed on.

-Shade

Well, here's how I do it:

20 Gig NTFS - WinXP
20 Gig Fat32 - Backup/Music/Appz
18 Gig EXT3 - Linux
2 Gig SWAP - Linux Swap


Oh, and I downoad to the NTFS drive... since Red Hat 9.0 and Mandrake 9.1 can write to NTFS (This is by default)....and are the only 2 linux Distro I run. The fat32 is only because I ocasionally network with a win98 box... which can't read NTFS. However, if I didn't have to do that, It'd be NTFS as well... There's not real need to run a fat32 "swap" partition if u're running RH 9.0.. or any later distro...

There are different variations of NTFS. Mandrake can write to a few but NOT all. You may have been lucky with yours but he/she may not be so lucky. I have read where people have really messed up their XP by writing from Linux. When I say messed up, I mean format and reinstall with a lesson learned.

You may want to try it but make sure you don't have anything you want to loose.

Just my two cents worth.