Suggested partition size for /boot, / and /home

[rdanner3]

Working on upgrading from Isadora (which often failed to understand my wireless card) to Julia (which does understand it, and on the LiveDVD mode at that!) and am looking to rebuild the partitioning.

Presently, I have two Linux-related partitions; one is the swap (I think it's 8Gb due to the maximum memory the machine can hold) and the other is a 130Gb partition for everything else.

What I want to do is separate / and /boot from the rest (probably leaving /home with about 60-80Gb) and return some of the excess to Windows 7.

Since this is my work (i.e.: writing) laptop, it is critical that I be able to bounce back and forth between the two OSes (so will be dual-booting Win7 Home Premium x64 and Julia x64) to manage battery better whilst not at home.

Suggestions would be most welcome.

(corrections made to show both are actually 64-bit OS)

[thouartsimple]

You probably will never need 8gb of swap space. I'd just do about a half gig above the RAM you have in the laptop.

/boot - 128-256mb will do the trick (mine is 26mb)
/ - 10-20gb
/home -- whatever you want really, what do you think you'll need?

[grey1960envoy]

What I run on my wife's laptop (Isadora) is 100mb/boot, 7GB / , 256mb swap running 3GB RAM,and the rest as home(not dual boot) but if it were, I'd save about 40GB for windoze

[rdanner3]

You probably will never need 8gb of swap space. I'd just do about a half gig above the RAM you have in the laptop.

/boot - 128-256mb will do the trick (mine is 26mb)
/ - 10-20gb
/home -- whatever you want really, what do you think you'll need?

OK, I use hibernate quite a lot, and I saw where someone showed to put swap at the size of your maximum memory, so...

Here's a partial list of my planned usage:

• LibreOffice (OpenOffice.org fork, but actually better, to my experience.)
• Various TTF fonts not originally installed with Mint that I need for my writing
• Various games, some Linux, some Windows (via WineDoors, etc. in the latter case)
• Room for downloads if I need to.

Machine probably doesn't need quite what I set for Mint originally, so was interested in getting it where I can (at need) do maintenance on the Windows partition (i.e.: fsck, et. al) if needed. (Not that I expect that to happen often.) and free up the excess space back to Windows. (Yes, I have a non-destructive partitioning solution available.)

What I run on my wife's laptop (Isadora) is 100mb/boot, 7GB / , 256mb swap ,and the rest as home(not dual boot) but if it were, I'd save about 40GB for windoze

Machine is a Toshiba Satellite A505-S6005 in my case. Plenty of space on the half-terabyte HDD... or so I thought, but anyone with a Toshiba (or other "modern" OEM-built machine) knows the reason for the shocking lack of actual usable space! Wish the OS manufacturers would force the OEM builders to supply recovery media again, including a fully-installable copy of the OS... but that digresses from this discussion badly.

As more and more of my needs are met by Linux (Mint or otherwise), I will probably start culling the Windows partition, but right now, 40Gb for it is out of the question. I don't recall current total, but I think it's 333Gb. And I'm down to something on the order of 4% free on it!

[DataMan]

Rather than such a large /home, consider setting up a separate data partition (make it ntfs if you want to hold data easily common to both Linux and Windows). Store your data there and you won't have to fret about things as much on new installs or upgrades. Of course, backup all of your "data" on a regular basis.

-DataMan

[thouartsimple]

To OP: You can hibernate with a little more RAM than you're system has. =)

I also have a Toshiba satellite, but I zeroed out the hard drive so no manufacturer crap on here for me!!

[rdanner3]

To OP: You can hibernate with a little more RAM than you're system has. =)

I also have a Toshiba satellite, but I zeroed out the hard drive so no manufacturer crap on here for me!!

Well, I've currently set linux-swap to 7.98Gb and it seems to be working fine. Until I can manage to get my keyboard working reliably in Linux Mint 10 (worked fine in 9, so go figure!) I can't safely zero the Toshiba-supplied partitions, freeing the space in the process, much as I'd prefer to do so. Heck, figuring out how to actually back those partitions up would be a good thing. Since they all seem to be visible from Linux, that may be possible. Any ideas, considering the partition backups would need to be bootable?

Rather than such a large /home, consider setting up a separate data partition (make it ntfs if you want to hold data easily common to both Linux and Windows). Store your data there and you won't have to fret about things as much on new installs or upgrades. Of course, backup all of your "data" on a regular basis.

Irks me that the OEMs aren't required to give the purchaser a copy of the OS-install media that is locked to that machine so the purchaser can dispense with so much of the bloatware. Given a choice, I'd kick out MS Office 2010 Home & Student trialware, the seemingly ever-present Microsoft Works Suite, etc, and not even install them.

And considering the fact that Linux can read Windows partitions, why bother with a separate, shared /data partition?

Weirdly, (probably due to an oops on my part!) booting of Linux Mint pauses and fusses that /dos can't be found. Considering the fact that my keyboard (for whatever benighted reason) doesn't work for more than a few minutes at a time (if at all) in Linux Mint, this is worrisome, (Worked fine in the LiveDVD mode, so I'm puzzled!) since correction of the proper configuration files is difficult at best if the keyboard doesn't work! (see the post I fired up in reference to the keyboard issue)

[sgosnell]

And considering the fact that Linux can read Windows partitions, why bother with a separate, shared /data partition?

Because Windows can't read a Linux filesystem. If you want to access the data from Windows, you need it on something Windows can read.

[rdanner3]

You probably will never need 8gb of swap space. I'd just do about a half gig above the RAM you have in the laptop.

Um, trying to anticipate when machine's RAM is maxed out, so I don't have to reallocate swap. It's proving annoying to manage the other partitions as 'tis!

/boot - 128-256mb will do the trick (mine is 26mb)
/ - 10-20gb
/home -- whatever you want really, what do you think you'll need?

The problem I'm currently running into is that root is down to under 200mb free, and packages are failing to install (or uninstall, in some cases) due to an error from dpkg that references "no such user "clamav"". Rather confusing, since I can't locate the file the error also references.

/home seems pretty happy with the 30-odd Gb I allocated it.
Root, as mentioned, is currently struggling.

Here's a freaky thing: Everything started going south after clamav broke and I tried to correct the broken packages. Since the best way to do these sorts of things is to uninstall everything and reinstall (at least on Winblows!) that's the method I tried. Obviously, something went awry.

[rdanner3]

And considering the fact that Linux can read Windows partitions, why bother with a separate, shared /data partition?

Because Windows can't read a Linux filesystem. If you want to access the data from Windows, you need it on something Windows can read.

Actually, that's not entirely true anymore. There is a solution to allow Windows to read (and write?) ext2 or ext3. Since my partitions are ext4, though... LOL

[Habitual]

viewtopic.php?f=90&t=11872#p72906

[AlbertP]

If your keyboard started doing strange things when you first booted the installed Mint, I think that something went wrong during install. Perhaps you can reinstall and get your keyboard working again.

And the ext2/3/4 reading solutions for Windows aren't that reliable and often people get corrupted data. I also have tried to copy an ISO file from ext to ntfs using Windows; the md5sum didn't match anymore after copying.