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[Tom <question77535@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question #77535 on Ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/77535

Tom proposed the following answer:
Yes but if you don't use 100% of the drive then you'll be forced to use
"Manual Partitioning" in the "Partitioning Section".  Personally i would
almost always recommend using the "Manual Partitioning" anyway because i
prefer being in total control of these things rather than using default
choices that might not suit me ;)

If you haven't got Windows pre-installed then you can create my perfect
layout (we all have different ideas about what's perfect btw).
Partition like this

sda1 Primary linux-swap partition = 2 x Ram size
sda2 Primary ntfs to fill most of the drive - this is for the Windows install
sda3 Primary ext3 of about 10Gb for / the Root of the linux file-system (where Ubuntu's OS and programs go)
sda4 Extended Partition of about 10Gb
.  sda5 Logical ext3 partition of about 10Gb for /home to hold the data and settings and any Windows programs you install in Wine inside Ubuntu.

Obviously you would have to use a linux partitioner for this because the
Windows one tries to hide what's going on with primary and extended
partitions - it's considered too complicated for their users and ensures
that Windows tends to be given a slight advantage automatically by
putting everything else in an Extended partition.  Hard-drives can only
have 4 primary partitions although one of those can be an Extended
Partition which acts a bit like a bucket that can then contain a lot
more partitions (but they wont be primary ones).  The ntfs might need to
be temporarily formatted with fat32, fat16 or something because the
Ubuntu version of gparted seems to sometimes have trouble with ntfs.
During installing Windows you'll be given the chance to reformat this as
ntfs, which is well worth doing :)  Note that Windows Partitioners also
can't handle making linux style "ext3" file-systems whether they are in
extended partitions or not.  So 1 slight inconvenience in Ubuntu but 2
fairly crucial ones in Windows <shrugs>

Also note that in hardware testing it's been found that many hard-drives
have significantly faster read/write times at the start of the drive
than at the end - this is why it's better to place the linux-swap at the
front if easily possible.  If you have 4Gb ram or over then you'll
probably not need linux-swap except for if you use "suspend" or
"hibernate" so in that case i would place the linux-swap at the very end
of the drive, inside the extended partiton, after the /home partition).
Then placing Windows next because it needs all the help it can get. Then
the Ubuntu OS in the last proper primary partition - it only really neds
about 4 or 5Gb if you give /home a separate partition but if something
goes wrong and you end up forgetting to put /home separately then 10Gb
is the minimum that Ubuntu needs.  I think it's always best to arrange
things to fail-safe and this also gives the advantage of flexibility for
the future.

Note that while the OS's need to be nearer the start of the drive
because there are a lot of unexpected read/writes in normal desktop
usage that can't be scheduled in advance, the data & settings
read/writes tend to be queued-up ahead of time in the Ram and linux-swap
(or in pagefile.sys instead of linux-swap in Windows) so data & settings
are quite happy at the end of the drive without any noticeable decrease
in performance, especially if that data belongs to a linux :)

Also given that most of your data can be safely read/written-to inside
the Windows partition it makes sense to keep almost everything in there.
There will inevitably be a few things you'll want to keep hidden in
linux but even 10Gb is plenty for all this, usually.  Note that the only
problem tends to be that linux can happily have much longer
path+filenames, 256 characters without problems but Windows will freak
out if a path+filename exceeds 80 characters or so.  This is usually
only an issue when saving web-pages - or when using folders, inside
folders, inside folders, inside folders to a quite extreme depth, or if
those folder names are excessively long - mostly you'll find that this
really isn't an issue and if it does happen then use Ubuntu to re-
arrange files-names to sort the problem out ;)

Blimey!  I hope this helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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