Dual boot setup on 80GB hard drive

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Supporting both Windows and Linux, but being a pretty much die-hard Linux fanboy, I broke down a couple of days ago and installed both Windows XP Home (the license on my notebook is home) and the latest Ubuntu Linux on my system. If you've been keeping up with my posts you'll know I'm not a huge fan of either. Windows tends to be too easy to infest with nasty things and Ubuntu 9.10 has all sorts of problems (power management for one) it's predecessor 9.04 didn't. But what I thought you might find interesting was the slightly oddball partitioning scheme I chose.

If you've ever installed Windows XP and Linux before then you know Windows XP likes to clobber the boot partition. Because it clobbers the boot partition I installed it first. (Actually I used a Linux live CD to set up the partitions first, then I rebooted and started the Windows install). I divided the partitions as follows:

/dev/sda1 * 1 2433 19543041 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 2434 4866 19543072+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 4867 9729 39062047+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 4867 5474 4883728+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 5475 9486 32226358+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 9487 9729 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris

The first partition is the Windows XP partition. You might think that 20GB isn't much, and I'd agree. After installing Windows XP, Gimp, CCleaner, AVG Free (normally I prefer Avast, but Avast has started forcing people to enter their email in to download) Free, and a few other applications I was left with 11GB free... just enough for that special game installation ;-)

The second partition is our main Linux / root partition. It's roughly the same size as the Windows partition. I probably didn't need 20GB for this partition because I only tend to install a few applications, but the extra space is there in case I do need it later.

The third partition is an extended partition. Extended partitions hold logical partitions. You can have up to 4 "primary partitions" or 3 primary partitions and an extended partition. I chose to have 2 primary partitions and an extended partition. In the extended partition you can have a number of logical drives. I have 3 logical drives. This makes a total of 5 partitions. (If you do everything as primary you can only have 4 partitions).

The fourth partition is really the focus of this piece, the oddball partition. The fourth partition is a 5GB partition that is formatted with FAT32. This might seem like a really strange choice because of both the size and format. 5GB really isn't enough to be used as a full fledged home data partition and VFAT/FAT32 isn't a logical choice for storing important data because it doesn't recover well from crashes. What it is useful for is transferring small files between operating systems. Ubuntu Linux automatically adds VFAT/FAT32 drives to the drives that get mounted at startup when you do your initial install. Ubuntu doesn't automatically add NTFS partitions to /etc/fstab (the file used during boot to mount partitions). And while it is possible to mount and write to NTFS partitions from Linux, it's more work and not as foolproof. The VFAT/FAT32 partition also gets recognized by Windows XP on startup, so there's really no work to be done other than the initial partitioning. This way I can share files between Windows and Linux without having to resort to something like a cloud computing environment.

The fifth partition is a 30GB /home Linux partition. Because I work with camcorder movies, I need a fair amount of space. The tools I have for Linux tend to be better than the tools I have for Windows. I do have a number of video processing tools for Windows (e.g. Ulead VideoStudio SE) but they're old. (Ulead has been absorbed by Corel).