I know that there are a few threads out there about partitioning hard drives, but I am a complete newbie and have not seen anything that has completely answered my question.

I am setting up a HTPC with a new 250GB drive. I have a VIA EPIA board, so I am going to try and use the gentoo based epios as my primary os. Ideally, my partition scheme provides as large an independent partition for my home dir as possible so that I can store music/movies/whatever away from the OS. If it is simple, I would not mind also having a small backup partition set that would allow me to install a different distro and test it without losing epios.

I know that I could have a million small paritions for every single dir, but ideally I would like to keep this as simple as possible. My goal is to have enough space free so that the OS works and I can install any programs that I may need, but obviously the bigger the /home dir is the better.

Thanks for any ideas.

This is only my personal opinion. In the following order (as primary partitions, not extended, so that #2 and #3 should be bootable)
2GB - <swap>
10GB - / - epios
10GB - free partition
remaining /home

On my HTPC I have 1GB swap, 8GB os, 100+ /media and I have not changed it in ~2 yrs still running with ancient RH8.

If you manage your space effectively and avoid needless updates and redundant software, then even 6GB is enough for an OS. If you plan to run something like MythTV, once setup you really don't need to update it unless there are some major security problems or you really need a new feature.

Also, in my experience, 10GB is perfect amount of space to do serious testing with another distribution.

Another tidbit of experience I've had. I've read various performance enhancements with XFS or Reiser for BIG partitions (ie. "media" partition). However some unrecoverable crashes I've had have pushed me back to always using EXT3. Just my personal experience.

Thanks for the reply. I am going to get all of my hardware together this weekend and hopefully by this time next week have a functioning hard drive!