partition advice for new laptop

[dix0r]

hey all,

just bought a dell studio 1555, tried to dual boot between vista and ubuntu, then decided to re-install ubuntu and nix vista.

i'd like to reinstall one more time and properly manually partition my disk (500 gb)

i don't have anything on the drive yet worth salvaging.

my understanding is that a good way to do it would be to create:



primary (ext3) of 10-20 GB for /



logical/extended for the rest
create a swap within the extended of about 8 gb (double my 4 gb ram)

now, how should i split up the remainder between home and data?

also, should all partitions be ext3?

many thanks!

[imhotep59]

How to split the remainder depends on what you need and what you want. I suggest you make a DATA partition in NTFS to store documents that you wish to share between Ubuntu and Vista (Ubuntu can read NTFS partitions). Then you will need an ext partition (/home) to store documents that will be exclusively accessed with Ubuntu (Vista cannot read ext or it will require a specific program). So, choose the respective sizes of these 2 partitions in accordance to your documents and files for Vista and Ubuntu.
If you use Ubuntu 9.04, you can format / and /home in ext4 (the most recent format which is now stable and will be the default format in Karmic Koala)