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I plan on having a quad boot configuration, with 3 linux distros and a single Windows 7.
How would you divide the partitions?
I already plan on having separate partitions as the following:

  • /boot, 100MB
  • /, how many GB?
  • /home, how many GB?
  • data, about 200GB

The data partition contains all of my data: script/code files, OpenOffice documents, etc.
But I don't understand how to divide all the rest and how much space should I allocate for them?
Also the 3 different linux distros have their respective /home directory, how much space should I allocate for it if I don't plan on storing there anything?

Each distro's home directory will have a symbolic link to the data partition.
This way my data will be shared among the different distributions.

Edit #1 (26 Nov, 19:24 UTC):
Disk size is 500GB.
My data partition must be 200GB and Windows partition must be 200GB.

Dor
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2 Answers2

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  1. You can use a common swap partition.
  2. The best if, if this swap partition is around the middle of your hard disk because of speed.
  3. Imho you can use a common home partition too, if the full separation of your distress isn't needed, but you like the perfect integration.
  4. To this home partition you could use even ntfs, too, although it is highly extreme and uncommon, I think it could be a very good idea for a test system.
  5. And yes, a boot partition at the begin of the disk is highly optimal, too. I gave this the fat partition type for the best cooperation with the windows.
  6. I installed the win to the second partition after the boot, because it feels himself there at best.
  7. /home will work best in the near of the geometrical middle of the disk, just as the swap.

Further decomposition of the partitions of your linuxes I don't suggest. It is clearly a home test system.

So your partition map will be the following:

  1. /boot (fat)
  2. /c (ntfs with the windows)
  3. linux1 (ext4)
  4. swap for the actual running linux
  5. /home (ntfs)
  6. linux2 (ext4)
  7. linux3 (ext4)

It is 7 partitions, so the simple old partition table won't work with this. But this isn't a problem, because you could use logical partitioning, which I can't suggest. It is so… unstable.

A better solution were the GPT partition table format. It can have 128 partition.

terdon
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peterh
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The problem is that there is no way to answer without knowing exactly what you will be using the Linuxes for. You only have 100G to play with, on my current Debian install, the / partition has 17G of data and my /boot 122M. That's me, the needed sizes will depend on

  1. For / : How many programs you want to install. Most of the data in / comes from installed software, not the OS itself. For example, my /usr directory is 11G the greatest part of which comes from my LaTeX documentation.

  2. For /boot : How many kernel versions will you want to install?

Personally, I would install one Linux distro and set up the others in Virtual Machines. If you really want to use all three as natively installed OSs, I would do the following:

  • Share the same /home partition. This will almost certainly not cause any problems and will reduce the necessary partitions.

  • Create a /swap partition, you did not mention it but it is very important.

So, I would partition the disk like this:

  • / : ~15G
  • /boot : ~150M
  • /home : ~35G shared across the 4 distros
  • /swap : ~ 2 x RAM, 4GB if you have 2GB RAM shared across the 4 distros

This adds up to (4 x 15) + 35 + 4 + (4 x 0.15) = 99.6G. Just add the extra space to one of your / partitions. The /swap only needs to be 2 x your RAM if you want to be able to hibernate (not just suspend) your Linux. I recommend you don't actually bother and keep the swap to approx. the size of your RAM or ~2GB if you have loads of RAM.

terdon
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