Hi all, I'm a relative Linux newbie, and am currently dual-booting Win7 with Xubuntu 12.10.

However, I am aware that in 6 months time, a new version will come around which I will probably want to upgrade to. This is where my question comes in... What is the optimum partitioning method for upgrading the distro?

Currently I have my partitions arranged thus:

sda (120GB SSD)
sda1: NTFS Win7 install (80GB)
sda2: /boot (200MB)
sda3: swap (2GB)
sda4: / (30GB)

sdc (500GB HDD)
sdc1: NTFS Win games (200GB)
sdc2: NTFS Win user area (200GB)
sdc3: /usr (40GB)
sdc4: /home (30GB)

I'd be quite interested in knowing of the best arrangement for upgrading, and why. I could happily change my 30GB root partition to be extended and include /tmp and /var as separate partitions. Would this be useful, though?

Oh, and this is for a powerful desktop rig running:

  • i5 2500k 3.3GHz CPU
  • 16GB RAM
  • Radeon HD 6870 graphics card
  • 120GB SSD
  • 500GB HDD
  • 1TB HDD (used solely for storing photographs)