NEW Hardrive ready to go

Okay got the new Hitachi 100g 7200rpm today and the disks from Dell. My question is how big to make the partition for window xp pro. I would like to experiment with other dual boot type stuff later but want to make sure to give XP room to breath and work best. Is it better to go bigger on the OS partition for add ons later or once its on it will stay the same?

 

Well, i dual boot with arch linux and i have a 80GB HD. I left a 15GB partition to linux and the rest is for windows. I leave all my music on my windows partition and then i use the rest for normal windows use and games. Whatever you choose to do, remember that if you choose linux you have to have a swap partition that is twice the size of the amount of ram you currently have installed. So, if you have 1.5GB of RAM, then you need a 3GB swap partition. As far as the actual size of your windows partition, i would say that 50GB is well over plenty, but if your new to linux i would start with a small partition and if you learn to love it more, then you can always resize your partitions with the great qtparted linux utility. If you have a 100GB HD i would say that you should allocate 20GB to both the linux partition and the swap partition, so make your windows partition something like 80GB. You should be fine with a size that big. Windows only takes up about 2GB for a fresh install, so if you plan to have a lot of music/games or other large programs, change the size accordingly!!


Have fun!

 

I think it really depends what you want to do. if you use windows mostly and want to play with the likes of linux, give XP as much as you can, bearing in mind that a decent linux install with lots of toys takes between 5 and 20Go (see full blown SuSE install), probably slightly more if you have 64bit cpu (all multimedia stuff needs to be 32bit to be able to use win32 plugins (see mplayer)
Also, it depends on how big was your other HDD and why did you got the new one:
- just to have some extra space? then use your original size as a guideline (how much of your original was occupied by windows +10G I guess = win partition. The rest is whatever is left.
- you ran out of space on the old one, or was <10G free for windows? Well, imho the same logic would apply (as long as your estimate windows + 10G doesn't exceed 100G

Bear in mind I that come from the other side, where my poison is linux

 

IMO, depending on how many really large apps you need to install (MS Office, Photoshop, games, etc...), 20-30GB should be fine for Windows. THEN, create a second data partition of 50GB or so and store all of your files (documents, mp3s, photos, etc...) there. That'll leave another 20-30GB available to play with.

 

I was going to suggest the same as lmychajluk did.

It really does depend on the types of programs in XP that you will use. Software like MS Office and several modern games, take up a ton of room. If i remember right, XP needs about 5gbs for a minimum bare install.

If you play alot of the modern games, then you are going to need more for XP. If you just do normall stuff, then probably about 15gb for XP would be good, and then do like lmychajluk said, and create a spare partition for your documents/music.

SG