I have a new Compaq Presario C300 laptop with XP Home.

It has a 80 gb hdd.

I want to install sled-10 and dual boot.

The XP side has a 8.3 gb recovery parition formatted in fat32. I can shrink the XP os partition to 20 gb. I was thinking on 2 gb swap, 10 gb /, and the rest as a fat32 partition mounted as /storage, in order to set up so XP and SLED can share a common partition.

1) Is there a better way to do this?

2) How big does the "/" partition need to be?

3) Do I need a "/home" partition?

4) Will there be permission issues?

If you have more than 1GB memory, your swap may not be used as much and you could get away with a 1GB swap file. It is OK to have a /home directory in the root directory. With such a small amount of space, it may be better. You won't run into a case where the root partition is too small but home is only half full. A separate /home partition is very handy when you switch distro's. You can reformat the other partitions and leave /home intact. If the /storage partition's filesystem is fat32, then both XP and Linux can write to the partition.

You might want to give a little more than 10 Gig for the / partition but for starters that is definitely plenty. You will not need a separate /home partition but it's nice to have in case you ever need to reinstall your OS.
There will not be any permission issues on the fat32 partition but you might want to have a separate NTFS partition for your XP. I would suggest the following:
2 Gig Swap (or just 1 Gig would be plenty)
15 Gig NTFS
35 Gig Fat32
10 Gig /
10 Gig /home
That isn't using the full 80 so make adjustments however you want. I would add one more linux partition so that you can have the option to install experimental distros onto it, even sharing your /home files between the two. Know what I mean?

1) You don't need so big swap I don't know how much memory do you have, if you have more than 512 MB you need about 500 MB, if less than about doubled value of your RAM
2) It depends on how much software you want to install
3) No you don't need it
4) No I don't think so

//-----

A bit too late

Thank you all for your responses. I appreciate the quick responses on this forum.

I will try to configure with 15 gb for windows and 8.3 gb for the recovery. Then use 2 gb swap, 12 gb for /, 10 for /home and the rest for the /storage partition for the suse installation.

I'll let you know how things go

UPDATE

I got a -3027 error while trying to resize the windows partition. I searched this forum and found the following link:
http://www.novell.com/support/search...rnalId=3481511
and a suggestion that I download the latest version of gparted and partition with it.
Gparted loaded and ran great, but found something on the windows partition and recommended running chkdsk /f in windows, and then reboot twice.

After that, I rebooted into gparted and shrunk my windows to 16 gb. I then rebooted into the SLED installation and made the partitions pretty much as listed above. Installing SLED as I write this.

Thanks again for all your help

For a Laptop, you might want to read the docs on resuming from hibernation. If your laptop has 1GB ram, you might need a swap partition as large as your memory to resume from hibernation. I don't know the answer presently, but it is something that could effect your partitioning scheme.

You have a recovery partition on ur laptop?
copy out the data, slipstream yourself an upgraded windows xp home with ur own key and save urself 8gig

sorry, but i never read any faqs to get it started, so i cant reccomend one... BUT i use Nlite and it has more than enough options.
I will suggest to you not to actually change much if you want to do a slipstream. All i do is put in my key automatically and add service packs and updates. Ive tried other options, but unless you want to do some really rigorous testing (like in vmware or something) then i wouldn't bother. For the basics, its drag and drop then click "make Iso". You really can't go wrong.

im not certain, but if you have a recovery partition, that means you don't have an install disk. extracting windows might be a pain, but if it dosent work you may be allowed to use your existing key with somebody elses XP home, but u'd have to ring microsoft - they might even post you ur own xphome cd. (don't hold ur breath, but it happened once)
You own the cdkey, so the license is yours.

Also you may find that your motherboard drivers and stuff are intergrated within the OS on the recovery partition, happened to me once, finding the drivers again was a pain, but possible. In short, if you get stuck, its a bit debateable wheather you are legally allowed to post things like this on here with a great level of absolution. "hint"

Also , concerning your linux/windows issue, i use a program in windows called EXT2fs to read my linux partitions - tho they have to be ext3 not reisers. i find it really reliable. in linux i use ntfs-3g and it mounts my win partitions read/write, never had a journal error or lost data.

So you could have:

hda1 ntfs 65G: XP-Home
hda2 ext3 10G: /root
hda3 ext3 4G: /home (i never use 4 gigs worth of home on my dual boot machine - EVER)
hda5 swap 1G: (eh, if you got it, why not)

You will have heaps of room. 15 gigs for windows isnt much when u got ur updates on, office installed, some fancy apps and maybe WoW or BF2 lol