Linux Mint Forums

Hi there,

I am looking for help with setting up a partitioning scheme for a Dual Boot system. As of now I have Windows 7 installed on an SSD, and a storage drive that holds all documents, pictures, downloads, games, and pretty much everything. The SSD is primarily for the OS. I would like to dual boot, installing linux beside windows on my SSD. But I also want to have all documents, downloads, and pretty much everything saved to the HDD. I am looking for help setting up a partition scheme that will fit my needs.

I'm guessing my two drives will need to be separated into 4 main partitions. Windows OS/Linux OS on the SSD, and Windows storage/Linux Storage on the HDD. However, I have heavily optimized settings in windows to reduce writes to the SSD and improve speed. I would like to do the same with Linux; so far I've read that /home, /var and /tmp should be stored on the HDD. Do they each get their own partition? If so how large? Also, where does the /boot directory go? Does it get it's own partition? If so how large should it be, and which drive should it be on?

That's all I can think of for now. For the record, I will be installing Linux Mint 13. The LTS appeals to me, plus apparently many improvements made in newer versions have been backported already.

Thanks!~

/var and /temp do not need to be that large as they are temporary storage for files used by the os and apps.
home would be your largest linux partition because that is where the os will store your completed files
these are separate partitions used by your linux os.
your windows partition on the hdd is generally formatted to ntfs format.
most linux os will read and write to those partitions with no problems at all

Thanks for the input. Can you suggest a size for /var and /temp?

Also, because the windows storage drive is formatted to ntfs, would I have to create a new partition, or could I just install /home on that drive without creating a new partition? Sorry if I misunderstood you, it just seems like you're saying that I would be able to do that, but it seems messy. Or do you mean that I will simply be able to access flies from my windows storage partition? ...Any extra clarification you could offer would be appreciated.

in windows you can resize the partition on the hard drive and install the /var partition and the / partition in the empty space (using linux)
you wouldn't be able to nest a partition within a partition because windows would give you an illegal command/ or in dos a sintax error.
temp and var can be any size you want. (temp i would set at least the same as the amount of ram you have in the computer or double)
var is a matter of choice since it is for the os to use the os install program usually sets the size of it.) usually the install prog sets the size of temp as well.
these are usually default settings but you can change them if you want.
most versions of linux set up swap partitions and is recommended to set them at double the ram. but with most of todays pc's having a large amount of ram.
swap is usually not needed. so let the os set the swap or set it to the amount of ram you have.
it does actually help under a heavy computing load.

most versions of linux can read and write to an ntfs partition with no problems at all so accessing them is not a problem at all.
hope this helped