Size of Partition

[dna]

I'm going to reformat tonight, so I thought I would stick a dual-boot on there while I was at it.
I have an 80 GB HDD. I need to know how big the partition for something like SuSE should be. I was going to give XP 10 GB, SuSE 10 GB and leave 60 GB formated in FAT32 for program storage that both OS could use. Is that enough for a suse install? Too much?

[Provicemo]

Most linux distros should fit happily on a 5 gig partition.

It's all those personal files that end up taking up a lot of space,
but by having that fat32 space you should be in good shape.

[Senor Panadero]

Isn't he going to want to put a small swap partition in too?

[Provicemo]

Good point, so it'll be more like:
32M /boot [optional]
256M swap
5G /
10G MS
the rest fat32

[saikee]

Doing another migration myself from a hard drive with 28 partitions to 43.

My Suse professional is 2.81Gb within a 5Gb partition.

[dna]

Coolio.
Ummmm... It's been too long since I did this. Install XP first or Suse? (is ashamed of the newbie question)

[dna]

Ah, I see

[bonso]

Id go with 10G for each of the OSes. You might get away with less but then you install a bunch of apps, put stuff in your home folder etc and those gigs slowly fade away... If you are planing on installing games in Linux, UT2k4 takes about 5GB, give it a bit more space.

My 0.02

[Ned Slider]

I'll just add one quick note to what's been said above:

If you want to avoid the potential "My Windows Won't boot" after installing linux problem, then there are a couple of additional steps you should take. First, make sure you set the hard disk access mode to LBA in the bios. Next, keep the windows partition completely below the 1023 cylinder limit (about 8GB). Taking these steps should avoid being hit by this potentially nasty little bug

Therefore, I'd recommend the following sizes and order when starting with a blank disk:

100MB linux /boot partition
7.9GB max Windows system partition (thus keeping it below 1023 cylinder limit)
10GB linux partition (or bigger if you want - I wouldn't go any smaller)
256MB-1GB Linux Swap partition (depending how much virtual memory you want available to linux)

Then split the rest between windows and linux as you see fit. FAT32 will allow you to share the remaining space between both OSes.

Install Windows first, then Linux.

Ned

[Provicemo]

100MB linux /boot partition

maybe i'm too picky,
but 100M is wayyy too much for /boot
Thats like 50 kernels (which is barely enough if your saikee )
for a partition that should only be mounted on a limited basis (boot, kernel update) 10-32M is enough

[dna]

Man, just realized that all my ISOs are outdated. Now I'm gonna have to spend time downloading more stuff lol!