Partitioning for multiboot

dodgem

dodgem

dodgem

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I'm planning on using a laptop for a variety of purposes, and am trying to figure out the best way to partition the drive...

It will be a daily use machine when i'm either not at home, or can't be bothered sitting at my desk to use my desktop machine. It will also be used for testing and configuring networks for work, and as a test machine for my web pages. I would also like to try out new Linux distros on it (new to me).

To this end, i want to have Windows 2k and Windows XP on it for ensuring that these OS's are happy on a network that i've set up, and that web pages display correctly in them.

I want Ubuntu as my daily workhorse OS, Fedora so that i can play around with an rpm based distro, Gentoo because i feel like a challenge, and CentOS for demoing server apps.

So i was planning on partitioning the 100Gb drive as follows (93Gb available on a 100Gb drive)...

Primary partition 1
9Gb Windows XP

Extended partition 2
5Gb Windows 2000
7Gb Ubuntu
7Gb Fedora
7Gb Gentoo
7Gb CentOS
2Gb Ubuntu /home
2Gb Fedora /home
2Gb Gentoo /home
2Gb CentOS /home
10Gb NTFS data

Primary partition 3
30Gb ext3 data -- symlinks from each /home directory to here for docs, pictures, downloads, desktop, etc

Primary partition 4
3Gb Swap

So each distro will have it's own home directory in a seperate partition for storing config files specific to apps in that distro, with symlinks to the ext3 data partition which will contain /user1/Documents, /user1/Pictures... /user2/Documents, /user2/Pictures.... etc. The NTFS data partition is really for sharing data between the linux OS's and the MS OS's since i really don't trust windows to write to an ext3 filesystem without buggering it up!

Does this look like a reasonable way to use the disk, or am i letting myself in for a world of pain? I have dual booted Win XP and Ubuntu before, and added Fedora into the mix without issue. And i have 5 partitions with various server setups on another machine with Fedora and CentOS installed on them.

I can't see a problem with what i want to do, but perhaps i'm being naive?...

Any advice welcome :)
 
Wow... how about making your own life easier by trying out new distros in a VM?

In fact... why not just have VMs for all (except the host OS of your choice)?
 
windows will install fine to an extended partition but as the others have pointed out, whats the point? Use a VM.
 
Actually, I've not played much with VMs so it didn't even cross my mind! I'll give that a go though - any preferences for which one to use? I'll do a bit of trial and error myself today...

I've not tried SimplyMEPIS no, looks like it's worth a look particularly to put on my girlfriend's laptop though - i was planning on putting Linux Mint on there, but this one looks like a good alternative.

As for Windows, i ended up putting XP and 2k on an extended partition but i ended up having a 150MB primary partition at the start of the disk which i was going to use as a /boot partition but didn't, and i think Windows would have complained if it couldn't have used that to install its boot loader!

I'm not going to put Windows in a VM for a couple of reasons, the main one being that i use Windows for some really old and awkward DOS programs that flash EPROMS via the serial port. Sometimes they just don't like certain hardware/windows version combinations, so confusing the matter with a VM seems like a bad idea! The other reason is that i want to be able to accurately replicate how a Windows user connects to a network for troubleshooting purposes, so again, using a VM seems like an unwanted layer thrown in...

Thanks for the input :)
 
I'd suggest dual booting between Windows and Ubuntu then running the other Linux distros you want to tinker with in a VM.

I'm setting up something similar on my desktop as we speak.

This assumes your laptop has enough horsepower and memory? Until I recently my PC was an AMD XP3200+ (2003 era, 2.2Ghz single core) with 1 gig ram. That adequately ran Windows XP on VirtualBox on Ubuntu for basic tasks like 4OD. Think I ran photoshop on it too.

Quad core + 4 gig is much better though :)
 
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