How many partitions do you use?

[happysmileman]

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB

/dev/hda1 * 1 6374 51199123+ 7 HPFS/NTFS //Windows XP
/dev/hda3 6375 9729 26949037+ 5 Extended //I think that just means the below entries are on extended partition?
/dev/hda5 6375 9453 24732004+ 83 Linux //Ubuntu
/dev/hda6 9454 9729 2216938+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris //Swap

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB

/dev/sda1 * 1 5 40131 83 Linux //Gentoo /boot (isn't used but not bothered to delete such a small partition)
/dev/sda2 6 130 1004062+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris //Gentoo swap
/dev/sda3 131 6210 48837600 83 Linux //Gentoo
/dev/sda4 6211 11048 38861235 b W95 FAT32 //Music and Black Books box set, and at times backup

The rest of my 250GB drive is unused (almost two-thirds of it... Don't have much of a use, but unused space can always be used for new distros or something.)
Also no /home partition, can backup anything I need anyway to external, and don't want to share between ubuntu and gentoo anyway

[koenn]

I saw this webpage ( http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partitioning ) and was thinking the best option seemed to be the 4th option down. The one with 5 partitions.
My question is what size should the various partitions be and can this all be done with the live cd?

That one is indeed a good layout for a multiboot system. Sizes depend on your needs, but follow the guidelines in the article, or try
10-15 GB Windows (NTFS) system
5-10 GB Ubuntu /
small /home ( few 100mb - 1GB) - it will only hold your user settings/preferenses for Ubuntu, assuming you store all other data on the FAT32 partition (that you can also reach from Windows)
the rest : data - as big as possible.

other schemes only make sense if you have special requirements for your computer, and understand their consequences re. the filesystem, etc. so you can accomodate for them by tweaking the partitioning scheme.


Here's mine:

Filesystem            Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             4.8G  3.4G  1.2G  74% /
/dev/hda2             swap
/dev/hda3              59M   28M   28M  50% /boot
/dev/hda5              29G   26G  2.2G  93% /home
/dev/hda6              41G   37G  2.9G  93% /srv

/boot is a leftover from some experiments,
/srv is what i use for data that doesn't belong to a specific user - a collection of CD images, backups from config files, downloads, ...
I keep those seperate because it sorts of reflects the wauy i partition my server(s) : users have a /home, but data (database, web pages, file shares) go under /srv (in stead of the more usual /var, where they get mixed with log files, spools, ..)