Hi all,

So I had a nice dual boot working with Win7 and Xubuntu. Then, in response to some good partitioning advice on a different thread (link), I decided to mess about with some of my partitions. Guess what? I wiped my D: (user) drive in Windows!

So I have decided to do a complete wipe of my system (after backing everything up in two places!!) and do a fresh install of both Win7 and Xubuntu.

Here's my thoughts on the partitioning config. I would love some feedback on what I am proposing, especially if there are any potential minefields I am creating!

System:
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500k (3.3GHz)
RAM: 16GB
Graphics: Radeon HD 6870

sda (120GB SSD):
sda1: 100MB NTFS Windows System Recovery
sda2: 80GB NTFS Win7

sdb (500GB HDD):
sdb1: 500MB ext4 /boot
sdb2: 18GB swapfile (to allow Linux hibernating)
sdb3: 100GB ext4 /root (Xubuntu 12.10)
sdb4: 350GB unallocated

sdc (1TB HDD):
sdc1: 1TB NTFS Win7/Linux shared data

sdd (1TB ext HDD):
sdd1: 1TB NTFS backup for sda, sdb, sdc

I know this looks like overkill, but I am a semi-pro photographer and have a lot of photo-related files that require storage on a separate drive and regular back-up to other sources.

Questions:

  1. Anything wrong with my proposed setup?
  2. My previous dual-boot setup only had one Windows partition, though both Linux and Windows were on the same SSD, are there any dual-booting issues with allowing Windows to keep its System Recovery partition?
  3. I don't know what to do with the 350+GB unallocated on the sdb. Could there be any Linux-related use for that? Could I multiboot different flavours of Linux using the setup in sdb, or will having one /boot partition cause problems with different Linux kernels? 350GB still seems like overkill for this, though!