Currently I have windows installed on my system which contains 4 drives where OS is installed on C: drive & other 3 drives i.e. D:, E: & F: contains the data.

I am thinking to only format the C: drive & install Linux on C: drive while keeping other drives with their data as it is. My hard disk is of 120 GB with every partition is of 30 GB. I would like to know what would be the structure of the Linux installation.

I would have separated / & /home partition into two partition if removing all the drives, but as I am keeping all the other drives, so is /home partition needed or do I create two more partitions in C: drive partition i.e. one for / & one for /home ?

What structure should I follow ?

The usual minimum partitions are '/' and swap.
You can split '/' down further, but I wouldn't bother in this case.
NB: obviously I'm just talking about your 'C: drive' as MSWindows calls it.

Definitely backup anything you can think of on there.
You'll need to ask the installer to do a custom partitioning, to ensure it asks you which partitions to use.
Assuming your data 'drives' are NTFS structured, you'll have to make sure you install the ntfs-3g pkg so Linux can r/w to them.

HTH

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Hi:

You could make a 1 GB swap partition and than allocate the rest of the drive to the EXT4 journaling file system '/'.

That way Linux would take over the whole drive if that's still what you want.-

That's what I did with my Slackware box.

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@Ztcoracat,

you do know what is the penalty for having misaligned partitions?

When you refer to "drives" in your post, you are actually referring to partitions on one drive. You might take a look at the brief article in the link below for some info on drive/partition naming conventions in Linux for future reference. You refer to C, D and other drives which you won't see in Linux but rather sda, sdb, etc. Ignore the part about hda, hdb as newer systems no longer use that.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-p...rive-mappings/

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Looking at initial post there is one single hard drive with four partitions. If all these partitions are primary then there is not much choice. Linux can use only one partition sda1, no /boot, no /home, no swap. Swap file is an option.

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As Emerson mentioned - you have one drive with four partitions. As the partition table only allows four primary partitions, the question is whether your four partitions are all primary, or if you have an extended partition and one or more of them are logical.

It would be a good idea to boot up a live linux ISO and post the output of "fdisk -l" and/or a screenshot of gparted so we can get a better picture of your current partition layout.

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Enlighten me.

Why misaligned partitions are the problem for hard disk drives.

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I would however suggest you use a separate /boot partition, mounting it only as needed so that you limit access to your kernel. If you use a system with UEFI, make sure your EF00 partition is never automounted or it could be problematic if you ever have the system crash or lock up.

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