Here is an image of pretty much how I plan to set out my hard drive after I remove the files that are currently on it to another drive few things are incorrect in the image though all sizes are correct but this is what I plan any advice would be good
sda7 will be ext4 20gb and will be used for a secondary test install of mint
sda8 will be ext4 57.05gb and will be used as a home directory (think I need to put mount as /home for it to work can someone verify that for me please)
sda5 is my 2gb of swap space
sda6 will be ext4 30gb and will be my primary install of mint (does this need to have the mount point set as / or not)
all of the above will be inside an extended partition
and then lastly on sda2 ntfs will be an install of windows
Any advice or tips would be great as normally I just let it go default settings and install itself this is the first time I have properly set up the partitions myself

The simplest would be to install windows first. During the installation of Mint you should set sda6 as / mount point and you will be given that option during the installation. Yes, set sda8 as /home mount point.

If you install a test system of Mint or any other distribution, make sure you install the bootloader to the / partition of that system and then go back to your primary Mint and update grub. Otherwise, if you install Grub from your test system to the mbr you will have boot problems when you overwrite it or format that partition later.

Any chance of recieving a link or something to some more info on this please

Arch Wiki! It's not Mint but it has a guide and suggestions on partition layouts.

Alex Brinister