Hey guys, i was wondering if you could help me to decide what size partitions to use on my laptop when I install gentoo 2004.2 (in like 30 minutes i hope).

I'm planning on dual booting gentoo 2004.2 and windows xp pro on the following system, keep in mind its a laptop:

Its a Dell Inspiron 5150:
3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor
1GB ram
60GB hard drive
ATI Mobility Radeon 9000
802.11a/b/g wireless card
DVD-RW/CD-RW

I'm looking at putting linux on the front end of the drive, and windows on the back, with a very large shared fat32 partition in between that both OS's can use, I just need suggestions for parition sizes and anything else that you guys would recommend.

I'm planning on the following:

hda1 - linux boot - ext2 - 32mb
hda2 - linux swap - (swap) - 1.5GB
hda3 - linux filesystem - ext3 - [I don't know how big]
hda4 - big ass storage space - fat32 - [I don't know how big]
hda5 - windows xp filesystem - NTFS - [I don't know how big]

So first off, does it sound like i'm sort of on the right track? Next, how big should I be making these OS partitions as opposed to the fat32 partition which I want the OS's to share? Please help!

sorry this post is mirrored on the laptop forum, im just very eager to get this started...

Hey Gauntalus,

The first thing that I'll mention is that I don't really think that you need 1.5 GB of swap space. Especially if you have 1 GB of ram. I'm running Gentoo 2004.3 with 512 MB of swap and it works fine for me with 640 MB of Ram.

Around 5 GB would probably suffice for your linux partition. I might even consider that to be a little excessive.

5 GB I think would probably fine for windows too as long as you turned off the system restore capability. If you're going to use system restore then I would recommend at least 10 GB for the windows Partition. Then use what ever's left for your fat Drive

You could also make just one fat partition and install windows on it and use it extra space when in linux. That's what I've done on my machine. Here's what I did.

hda1 - Swap - 512 MB
hda2 - Fat32 - 23 GB
hda3 - ext3 - 6 GB

When I copy things to windows I usually put them right into the desktop folder so that they're there when I switch over. Which ever way works best for you though.

hey, i've posted threads on a few different forums and the general consensus is that i should not try using a central shared partition. I'm not quite sure what you were suggesting, but it sounded like creating a ~30 gig fat32 partition for hda1 and installing xp on it, then using the rest for linux?

Just to make sure, gentoo would be able to read from my windows partition correct? I'm gonna be using this thing for school, so i need my files to be easy to send from os to os.

Also, just to keep us on the same page, between this forum and others that I'm posting on, would this sound like a logical distrobution given my circumstances?

hda1 - fat32 - windowsxp and music storage - 40gig
hda2 - ext2 - linux boot - 64mb
hda3 - (swap) - linux swap - 1GB
hda4 - linux - ext3 - 19GB

that should work for you...the only thing i would suggest is you could cut back on the 1 gb swap...you mentioned you have a gig of ram, and with that much ram, i'm doubting your swap would ever be touched...linux utilizes all the ram before attacking the swap...so unless you're planning on huge graphics or video...you'd prolly be ok with maybe 512 mb swap.

i have 512mb ram, and a 512mb swap partition, and i've yet to use any of my swap space yet...