Good partition strategy?

[Starfury_2260]

I'm wondering what's a good partitioning setup for a 120gb hard drive. I want to put RH9 on there along with windows. Also which should I install first? I'm also getting Partitionmagic so how would that help me to do this?
I was thinking maybe 20gb for windows, 30 for redhat, 20gb for backup of windows, 20gb for apps (program files on this old comp is 11gb so maybe more), 30gb for files and downloads.

[shawshank62]

if you have partition magic then DO NOT make any partitions while installing windows. just let it do your full 120, then install partition magic and make your partitions. i have found that this works much easier. I have mine set up as 40 for windows, 40 for downloads, 40 for games. i have linux on a seperate machine.

[Starfury_2260]

thanks for the info.

[jkrohn]

if you have partition magic then DO NOT make any partitions while installing windows. just let it do your full 120, then install partition magic and make your partitions.

I would NOT reccomend this.
Here is what I would reccomend.
5 GB for JUST windows.
X GB for backups.
20 GB for apps
30 GB for files
20 GB for Rehdat

Adjust apps, files, and X to fill the rest of the 120.
As far as partition types, I would reccomend making them all FAT32. But at the very least make Files and Downloads Fat32. Redhat can read and write to Fat32. RH cannot write NTFS for all intents and purposes.

How to accomplish this.

Leave the drive unformatted and unpartitioned.
Boot the XP CD. Make a single 5 GB partition, install windows in it.

Load up windows and create everything else using PM. Leave 20 GB unpartitioned for linux! (20 is more than enough for now)

Boot the redhat install and use that unpartitioned space. Make /swap 2x your RAM up to 1 GB for swap, and the rest in /

RH will then install and you should be able to boot both.

Jkrohn

[Starfury_2260]

Thanks Jkrohn!!

[VHockey86]

I think Partition Magic is kind of a waste, unless you really care about pretty colors (which a linux boot has ne ways).

I like to have a bigger windows partition than is prolly needed because I store a ton of data on the desktop...

Id say

20 Windows
60 misc data (or if u want to be really organized break that up into games/documents/music/ whatever)
10-20 linux
20-30 unpartitioined until you decide something better for it =) (maybe another OS some day)

[inzzane]

Would linux work well off an external. I've got a 60G laptop and a 250G External running a P4 3.06. I never thought about partitioning and adding linux until this post. But have been interested in checking it out.

[Dj-Icer]

for example, i would have 3 partition for each one of them; system, game, and other stuff

[Sixpac_XP]

I would also put in a partition for my swap files.. just make it 2.5x the size of your physical ram and make sure you change your OS system properties and put your swap file in that partition.

[Starfury_2260]

that would be 2.5gb cause I got 2 512mb of pc3200 ddr ram