dual booting my new dell m4600

I am trying to get some feedback on 15/win7 dual boot plan. I haven't set up a linux desktop in a long time, so any help appreciated.

My new computer:
Dell M4600 laptop
i7 2820 quad core
16 GB of RAM
128GB SSD Mini drive
256GB SSD


My tentative plan:

128gb mini ssd
--------------------
1)/boot 250mb ext4 (grub)
2)Logical Volume
/ 50 gb ext4
3)windows 70 gig ntfs


256gb ssd
-------------------
1)Logical Volume
/swap 8gb ext4
/home 75gb ext4
2)windows (MyDocuments,etc) 75 gb ntfs
3)shared 756b fat32

Is spreading both the operating systems across 2 disks a bad idea?

Is 8gb swap enough? I really don't expect to be swapping much with 16b of memeory.

Is having the one shared partition a good method of sharing data or should I nix the ntfs and ext 4 partitition and jut go all fat32?

Any downside to how I am using LVM here?

If I set up LVM and allocate all the space, is it a problem if I ever want to shrink a partition so I can add an additional one in the future?

 

Get rid of the boot partition - it aint really necessary or useful much these days. A boot partition is useful only in cases when you want to use a single boot loader to boot multiple distros, probably bringing up a set of RAID, LVM volumes (I mean the OS is installed on these kinda volumes), etc.

Instead install GRUB onto the boot record of the / partition. Now the next question would be to whether to keep the Windows partition as the primary or the Linux partition ? I'm not totally sure but Windows initially never let you install on anything other than a primary partition. I've always made Windows a primary partition to avoid this BS but still boot up Linux as the primary OS without any problems.

If you want GRUB to be the master boot loader then install it on MBR otherwise if you want the Window's BCD boot loader to come up as the first thing use EasyBCD or some other BCD configuration tool in Windows to bootstrap and chainload GRUB from Window's BCD.

Swap partition on an SSD is highly unadvisable - since your system has 16GB of RAM you would hardly have any use for it - so dont create a swap.

No spreading the operating systems on multiple disks aint a bad idea - in fact you would get better access times when you do some huge data intensive operation on your home directory while the system is busy doing some huge operation on its root partition files.

Win 7 will refuse to get installed on a FAT32, besides linux read/write support for NTFS is equally good as Windows. Yeah you can copy files into NTFS partition from Linux, in Windows if you wish to view the files on your ext4 partition - there are couple of free tools which offer read access easily If you mean for the shared partition, then go with ntfs instead supports huge files and should work well with linux equally as fat32.

I didnt quite get how you're setting up LVM here or the objective behind it. Say if you create the partitions of 256 GB SSD as LVM instead - you cant access these files under Windows with ease afaik. If you want an LVM in the first place then allocate some space for the Windows partition (either fat32 or ntfs) then use the remaining for LVM to set up your home and other partitions.

IMHO LVM is a pain - I dont know about the performance but unless you have a real need for LVM (you're gonna dynamically add/remove disks very very frequently). If you just wanna utilize multiple hard drives as a single drive go with RAID using mdadm instead - far far better both performance and for easy of use.

 

Thanks a bunch for the reply. Some comments on your reply that could use your input:

-Swap I don't agree with this although I have zero experience with SSD and linux. As far as I know, swap can't hurt and shouldn't be used unless necessary. The only disadvantage is the loss of disk space. Also, I don't think you can go into hibernate without swap space.

-Raid I don't think I want to use raid because I don't want to lose disk space. What raid scheme would your recommend?


-Thanks for your tip of putting windows on a primary partition. I just installed windows on a non-primary and when it rebooted it could find the disk. I am going to retry with a primary.

-I always thought /boot was important for flexibility and since it only really takes 200 megs, why not?

-I guess LVM might be overkill. Might thought was that it would give me some flexibility in the future if I wanted to change my partition scheme a bit. But yeah I would just set it up on the /home and / directory.

 

RAID-1 will allow your machine to continue operating if a single drive fails. RAID-0 adds the two drives together into one super drive that's twice as big as the smallest one. So a RAID-1 of two 120G drives gives you a 120G drive that can survive a complete failure of either drive. A RAID-0 would give you a 240G drive that would fail if either drive failed.

If you're gonna make multiple partitions, partition out /home so you can reinstall without losing all your user data with ease.

 

Actually I didn't think about hibernation. There are ways to get around without a swap partition but by using a swap file which gets stored on your root partition or something (but this is equivalent to having a swap partition in terms of read/write). Anyways since you have a huge amount of memory I doubt the kernel would fill up the swap partition much. So I recommend for now create a swap partition and observe how much of it gets used during your regular workloads.

RAID-0 is just a linear mode which combine multiple physical hard drives/partitions into a logical without any redundancy. Dont use it unless you really need to IMO for data backup and stuff RAID-5, RAID-6 are the recommended ones in terms of efficient usage and performance.

/boot was required a long time ago when BIOS had limitations of where the partition boot sector could be located. It was 8GB mark initially but they went past it sometime after 2000 I think. Then there was a 127GB limitation. PCs bought within the past 2-3 yrs dont even have the 127GB limitation afaik.

LVM on the root partition is a pain. Keep the root partition as a physical partition to keep it simple. You can use any combination of LVM/RAID for any other partitions you wish to create.

 

Yeah I am going to ditch lvm, I think it is probably overkill.

FYI-I was planning on using fedora and I just found out that the new preupdate feature requires a 750mb boot partition. THis is a feature that lets you perform a live full system update.

 

Hmm that sounds interesting never heard of that - in that case go for it.... But the problem with /boot partition is initially they required only around 16MB, then they said around 80 - 100 MB, I know it went something around 200 MB with Fedora 12 or so and now you say 750MB. It will work for the current, but for the future there is no guarantee - that is one reason I've avoided /boot ever since. Fedora is one distro which somehow always insists on having a /boot partition but most others do not.

Anyways 750MB is quite a lot of space for the boot partition. If you value the preupgrade feature and feel you'll really make use of it (I always prefer a clean install after a backup of home dir and config files than an upgrade - helps to isolates many issues)