Dual Boot Question Running Mint

I always fall back on Vista.I cleaned up my hard drive with the intent to dual boot Linux Mint.I have two partitions on my 80gb hard drive.These are showing up as drive C: and drive D: . C: partition has mostly Windows Vista files and programs that will not run from the D: partition.I only have 13.5gb free space of a total of 33.5gb on C: partition.One or two Vista updates and this can jump to 29gb used space.Of course I can clean it up and get it back to 13 to 14 gb of free space.Is there going to be enough room to dual boot Linux Mint?Which version of Mint should I run?I currently boot Linux Mint Julia from a 4gb flash drive.I had considered trying to boot from D: partition but my bios won't allow it.

Here's how my crap is partitioned from the Acer factory.

 

Mint on average takes about 2.5-3.5GB depending on what you want installed. If you use the DVD version which is the one I prefer you'll get OpenOffice, multimedia and the kitchen sink.

You can either shrink drive d: and then create another partition drive e: when installing Mint or you can integrate it within your Windows Vista install.

Btw: Mint 11 gets released in May.

 

I may wait for Mint 11.I don't need office software or multimedia.Just basic surfing and I'd like to try my hand at building apps.How can I boot from drive D: or E:?I tried to install mint on drive D before but could never boot into it.My bios is crippled I believe.It doesn't offer me many boot options.I fought to get a flash drive to boot.My pc will only boot the flash drive once.After I shut down or on restart,it boots directly into vista.

 

You have to specify that it's a /mount drive. This is done during the install. You may also consider making a pagefile, this is also done during install as well. I use the ext4 file system.


edit: The Grub is the boot loader for Linux. It's what let's you boot either into Windows or Linux.

 

OK,here's my plan.I wanna allocate 5gb from D: , create E: ,and install Mint on E: .Does this seem like a good plan?Is 5gb enough room for Mint and future updates.It'll be a couple years before I move on to a new computer.I am using THIS LINK to help me make the changes to my partitions.

 

Ehhh... you can get away with 5GB, but you will have to keep an eye on your diskspace and dump any .tars you get religiously after unpacking/using them. I would recommend 8GB as the minimum for any OS installation (regardless of what flavor), that should cover basic use and any future updates/drivers/stuff. The more the better, depending on your usage of course, though if it is just basic usage and a bit of linux learning you probably won't need more than 16GB ever really.

Also I doubt your bios is broken, you are probably just hitting the boot menu instead of the actual bios menu. The way my asus works is, if you push esc at post it will bring up the boot menu (and only boot from your selection the one time), if you push DEL you enter the real bios and can configure the boot options (you can force it to always boot from usb first if you wish). I don't know what the keys are for acer, try f2 or f12...

And once you get booted into a live linux usb key environment, use gParted to fix your partitions. I would not A) allow windows to play with its' own partition structure and B) play with any partitions at all while still using (an OS on) the disk. Especially if you have data on the disks, that is asking for trouble. An outside source (the usb key) is the perfect way to do it.