Re: partitioning a new hard disk

[Mark <mamarcac@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 11:38 AM, roberto <roberto03@gmail.com> wrote:

hello,
a friend gave me a laptop (sony vaio) where i want to install debian
squeeze (in dual boot);

[snip]

how would you repartitionate the disk, since i have to leave a certain
amount of space for Xp for other users ?
i thought about installing debian next to the VAIO_ partition and then
use the other partition VAIO for read and write

What I do in dual boot situations (starting from center of hdd working towards the outside) is have 20 GB for XP, 20 GB for Debian (2 GB of that is swap space), then a fat32 partition for the remainder of the disk called "storage" or something similar, that gets mounted in XP as E: drive for example, and in Debian by editing /etc/fstab.  I choose fat32 becuase of it's native read/write support in Windows and Debian - ntfs could work though with ntfs-3g.  You can use jkdefraggui (freeware) in XP to move all files to the start of the partition before re-sizing so the re-partitioning doesn't mess up XP.  It's worked for me several times when adding Debian to an XP-only drive.

Just my thoughts, take or leave as you wish.  Good luck either way.

Mark