Partitioning

[Zren]

Okay, without expressing how much I love Mint for doing all the awesome things it does right from the get-go, I am wondering if the way I've set up my drive for dual booting is awesome enough. Seeing as I hope not to need to reinstall Linux...often (I'm bound to screw it up sooner or later). However, I'm sure I will be reinstalling some form of Windows...quite often. Thus I want it to be set up to easily reformat that partition only without having to reinstall GRUB and the like. If that's not possible, then that's all I want to have to do.

The way I figure it should be set up is:
[100Mb] Linux /boot
[8Gb] Linux-Swap
[40Gb] Linux /
[100Mb] Windows Boot
[60Gb] Windows X (XP/Vista/7 probably gonna be 7 till the RC ends)
[~200Gb] Storage space in NTFS (So it's viewable by both) with Music/Movies/Code/etc.

Think this will work as intended? Is there something else I need on to set up on the Linux side? I'd rather reinstall Mint now then everything later.

[apomb]

NTFS access by linux beta drivers is sketchy at best... In my experience anyway, it might be more robust now, but a few years ago it was pretty unreliable.

I now have separate disks because of that. Mint does do a fantastic job of accessing my windows drive when i want it to though... and if it does screw up, ive only lost the Windows stuff, not linux too.

[Zren]

Would FAT be better? seeing as those are the only options available for Windows. Though I have a semi usual backup of the important things (music) so I'll probably rant and hate Linux, but it'll be like a hate/love thing.

[rdrake]

You may wish to store your data on a separate partition under Linux. Also, how much RAM do you have? The old way of doing things used to be about 1.5x the RAM size for swap. Eight GB may be overkill. Personally I rarely ever use swap space anyway, so often I omit it. Bad idea if you want to hibernate.

I'd recommend knocking down the swap to about 6 GB (if you have 4 GB RAM). Add the extra space to the 40 GB and split off maybe 8 GB for a root drive. Use the remaining for /home so your data is safe in the case of a reformat.

Also as stated above NTFS under Linux is indeed flaky at best. Often I have files that Linux touched become invincible to Windows. I have to switch back to Linux to delete them. It also does a spectacular job of corrupting random files.

If you're using ext3 for your /home file system under Linux, you can install the Windows driver for ext2/3 and access your /home. In fact you can make your /home about 230 GB, install the driver, add your /home to your Windows 7 libraries, and keep all your data under that.

Or just use FAT32, whatever floats your boat.

[Zren]

I forgot I only had 3Gb when I installed (I though I had 4) and I heard double for the swap space is good.

I'm using Ext4, is there a Windows driver for it yet? I found this for 2/3.
Also, wouldn't this driver be as shaky as Linux->NTFS considering I doubt this is a driver MS made, no offense but MS hasn't murdered any of my files accidently yet.

Edit: Found out you can use Ext2fsd to mount Ext4 since it's simliar to Ext2... http://www.soluvas.com/read-browse-explore-open-ext2-ext3-ext4-partition-filesystem-from-windows-7/ however it's read only.
I'm thinking I should I go with Ext3 instead of Ext4?

[ecookman]

For no particular reason ext3's i like better, simply because linux worked on the ext3 not 4 on my computer... so i'd say ext3 (please don't being the technical rain of hate)

[md]

Once you have 2 or more gigs of ram a good rule of thumb to use is 1-1 memory size for swap space. Hibernation compresses the resident pages, and anything that can be reloaded from the HD (executable code for instance) is just dropped.

[Zren]

I've turned off Hibernation/Sleep as best as I can. Don't really like it/trust it much in Linux.

Anyways, thank for all your input. I'll go with the Ext3 driver thing and if that fails I'll probably just do FAT.

[100Mb][Ext4][/boot] Linux
[3Gb] Linux-Swap
[20Gb][Ext4][/ ] Linux
[100Mb] Windows Boot
[60Gb] Windows X
[~220Gb][Ext3][/home] Storage

Edit: Decided to keep the main parts of Linux in Ext4

This is Z signing off.