I'm going to build a dual boot gentoo box (stage1 hopefully), on a 115gb disc, and was wanting to know if I had to arrange the partitions in such a way that the /boot partition is near the beginning of the disc (I intend to use LILO).

I am intending to use the following scheme:
/dev/hda1 Fat32 - Windoze partition - 80G
/dev/hda2 ext2 - /boot partition - 32M
/dev/hda3 swap - Swap Partition - 512M
/dev/hda4 ext3 - root partition - rest of disc ~34.5G

Is that a suitable arrangement, that will not cause problems, becuase I've heard things about being past a certain cylinder on the disc for booting from it.?

Also is the swap partition of suitable size, as I have 511M RAM?

Thanks
Alex

IIRC swap partitions are supposed to be double your amount of RAM, ie yours should be 1024mb.

Your boot partition also seems rather small, I'd give yourself at least a couple of hundred mb.

Also you might want to google around a bit more. There are some good partitioning guides out there.

32 mb is plenty for a /boot if you format with ext2 (you can fit about 1 kernels in there without any worry). If you want a journal, like with ext3 or reiserfs, you'll need 64, as the journal is about 30mb.

Don't worry about LILO, as the, now "wive's tale", limit is far exceeded by your 80GB win32. The limit is the 1024th cylender, which is about 8.4GB, which is the same magical size that early pentiums and before (and 16 bit OS's like Win95 couldn't "see" past it - a large drive just couldn't be recognized) couldn't take larger drives than 8.4GB (making them a commodity, bringing much higher prices than much larger drives). LILo doesn't have that problem any more, so you'll be fine. Unless you're going to use some seriously huge graphical programs, I don't think that you'll see much swap used. I have 384mb and I have a 200mb swap partition, which almost never gets used at all. I run KDE and Firefox with several tabs open at a time while listening to music and compiling and nearly never hit swap. But, YMMV. Everybody uses their machines differently.