Dual-boot partition size recommendations

[Bill in SD, CA]

OK, got my 40 GB RMA drive from WD and am getting ready to set it up again for dual-booting 98SE and W2K.

Going for 4 partitions here.

Hopefully my dying 40 will last long enough for one more boot into each OS so I can backup my drivers for each OS for ease on installation of PCI cards later.

I want a small FAT32 partition for the 98 OS as I plan to add a larger FAT32 partition for apps and data after I get 98 setup and running.

After that I will install 2K on a NTFS partition and allocate another NTFS partition for apps and data for 2K.

BTW, I have a 60 GB slave with 4 FAT32 partitions if that helps in the equation.

Plan of attack is to setup the 2 FAT32 partions on the new drive, format, slave it to the dying 40, save the drivers backup to the second partion, master the new drive, do the install after pulling the unnecessary PCI cards, and repeat the process for 2K.

And your 2 FAT32 and 2 NTFS partition size recommendations are ................................. ?

Or would you do it differently?

Thanks,

Bill

[washe]

On my last reinstall I gave 8 Gig to my win XP install and 42 gig ntfs for data + a 10 gig partition on a fat32 for data exchange with in linux...

you can check how much space your win98 currently is and allocate similar space to it.

[Iturea]

Not sure if this helps but:

My friend was doing the same type of thing you are shooting for and he was running Windows XP on 1 partition and installing program files on the larger partition.

Well he set his Windows XP (operating system only) partition to 2 GB and the remaining partition for his programs, etc. Well it worked fine for a while and then blam he started getting (low on virtual memory) errors. So he then set the virtual memory to a constant (smaller size) and started looking around for temporary stuff and deleting that ?again worked fine for a time and blam ?(low disk space) errors starting popping up! Crap kept growing and growing on his operating system partition even with a constant virtual memory setting. He constantly had to delete temporary things and free up space.

So in other words ?I know you are not installing Windows XP but maybe 2GB minimum or larger would be something to aim at for your OS partitions.

Then of course whatever you have left can be for your apps.

I wouldn’t recommend this method though ?I know it speeds up things a hair by partitioning up your OS/apps, but you have to ask yourself if that hair of performance is worth the troubles you will undoubtedly face. My friend’s computer ran an Athlon XP 1800 with 512 megs of DDR and the change from his partioned out drive to a one partitioned drive didn’t reveal that much of a performance change.

I would make two partitions ?1 for 98 and the other for 2000. Win 98 doesn’t need much at all ?2000 will need more. Which ever OS needs more installations would of course need more space allocated. Divide it up accordingly.