Question #77535 on Ubuntu changed: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/77535
Tom proposed the following answer: Yes but if you don't use 100% of the drive then you'll be forced to use "Manual Partitioning" in the "Partitioning Section". Personally i would almost always recommend using the "Manual Partitioning" anyway because i prefer being in total control of these things rather than using default choices that might not suit me ;) If you haven't got Windows pre-installed then you can create my perfect layout (we all have different ideas about what's perfect btw). Partition like this sda1 Primary linux-swap partition = 2 x Ram size sda2 Primary ntfs to fill most of the drive - this is for the Windows install sda3 Primary ext3 of about 10Gb for / the Root of the linux file-system (where Ubuntu's OS and programs go) sda4 Extended Partition of about 10Gb . sda5 Logical ext3 partition of about 10Gb for /home to hold the data and settings and any Windows programs you install in Wine inside Ubuntu. Obviously you would have to use a linux partitioner for this because the Windows one tries to hide what's going on with primary and extended partitions - it's considered too complicated for their users and ensures that Windows tends to be given a slight advantage automatically by putting everything else in an Extended partition. Hard-drives can only have 4 primary partitions although one of those can be an Extended Partition which acts a bit like a bucket that can then contain a lot more partitions (but they wont be primary ones). The ntfs might need to be temporarily formatted with fat32, fat16 or something because the Ubuntu version of gparted seems to sometimes have trouble with ntfs. During installing Windows you'll be given the chance to reformat this as ntfs, which is well worth doing :) Note that Windows Partitioners also can't handle making linux style "ext3" file-systems whether they are in extended partitions or not. So 1 slight inconvenience in Ubuntu but 2 fairly crucial ones in Windows <shrugs> Also note that in hardware testing it's been found that many hard-drives have significantly faster read/write times at the start of the drive than at the end - this is why it's better to place the linux-swap at the front if easily possible. If you have 4Gb ram or over then you'll probably not need linux-swap except for if you use "suspend" or "hibernate" so in that case i would place the linux-swap at the very end of the drive, inside the extended partiton, after the /home partition). Then placing Windows next because it needs all the help it can get. Then the Ubuntu OS in the last proper primary partition - it only really neds about 4 or 5Gb if you give /home a separate partition but if something goes wrong and you end up forgetting to put /home separately then 10Gb is the minimum that Ubuntu needs. I think it's always best to arrange things to fail-safe and this also gives the advantage of flexibility for the future. Note that while the OS's need to be nearer the start of the drive because there are a lot of unexpected read/writes in normal desktop usage that can't be scheduled in advance, the data & settings read/writes tend to be queued-up ahead of time in the Ram and linux-swap (or in pagefile.sys instead of linux-swap in Windows) so data & settings are quite happy at the end of the drive without any noticeable decrease in performance, especially if that data belongs to a linux :) Also given that most of your data can be safely read/written-to inside the Windows partition it makes sense to keep almost everything in there. There will inevitably be a few things you'll want to keep hidden in linux but even 10Gb is plenty for all this, usually. Note that the only problem tends to be that linux can happily have much longer path+filenames, 256 characters without problems but Windows will freak out if a path+filename exceeds 80 characters or so. This is usually only an issue when saving web-pages - or when using folders, inside folders, inside folders, inside folders to a quite extreme depth, or if those folder names are excessively long - mostly you'll find that this really isn't an issue and if it does happen then use Ubuntu to re- arrange files-names to sort the problem out ;) Blimey! I hope this helps! Good luck and regards from Tom :) -- You received this question notification because you are a member of UF Unanswered Posts Team, which is an answer contact for Ubuntu. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuforums-unanswered Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuforums-unanswered More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
