What's the best way to partition my harddrive for a dual boot scenario?

Question

I have a 250Gb unpartitioned harddrive that I wish to reformat and partition for a dual boot scenario.

I wish to have Windows XP Pro on one partition, Ubuntu on a second, and all my data on a third.

I currently have around 100Gb of documents and 50Gb of Program Files (although this will be reduced as I am not going to reinstall everything).

What size partitions should I create? I was thinking 60Gb for Windows, 150Gb for Data, and 40Gb for Ubuntu. Or can you recommend a better spread?

Answer 1

I would consider software like Partition Magic's Boot Manager or better still :

"Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0"
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/multibooting.html

Your selection for the Windows partition size is a bit high. I use XP MCE and along with Office pro 2007, full Adobe Suites & many many other programs I still use only 15GB on the C drive.
I have it at 30GB total because this way the defrag process is optiomal (as is performance).

Unless you plan to install games that require HUGE amounts of disk space I think that 60GB will have you end up with wasted hard disk real estate.

Good luck !

FYI ... if you are planning to purchase Boot Software you may be better off just buying a second hard drive instead.
An 80GB drive is under $50.

This way you can toggle "Primary Boot Drive" in the BIOS betewen the two hard drives to install & choose the OS you want to use.
The software will cost $40 or more & if you tire of multi booting there's not much else you can do with it.
This way at least you'll have an extra hard drive.

regards,
Philip T

Answer 2

in case you boot to the Ubuntu stay cd and then set up, Ubuntu will instant you the place you prefer to place in. you could resize the present partitions and create new ones directly from the set up recurring.

Answer 3

I used PowerQuest's PartitionMagic and BootMagic.