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[Tom <question77500@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question #77500 on grub in ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub/+question/77500

    Status: Open => Answered

Tom proposed the following answer:
Brilliant, nicely done!! :))))
So now you can boot into Windows or Ubuntu and the boot menu has a few different options for Ubuntu?  

The fdisk note "Partition table entries are not in disk order" is just
to remind people that are more used to looking at gui representations -
it's not a problem at all.  Even if your partitions do happen to be
numbered from the start of the drive it still prints that message lol.
Writing the partitions in order they appear on the disk you hopefully
now have

sda3 /boot
sda4 linux-swap - this doesn't have a "mount point" that you need to define
sda1 Xp
sda2 Extended (bucket)
 . sda5 /home
 . sda6 /


I usually find that after playing around installing tons of stuff and tweaking everything in sight i tend to break the system somehow and eventually need to reinstall the OS.  When you get to that point it would be worth deleting sda6, then move sda5 to the end of the drive and resize it.  The create a new sda6 in front of sda5 but this time sda6 will only need to be about 5Gb.  

When you install Ubuntu at that point make sure you don't format sda5
and then you'll find that a lot of things remain personalised your way
and your data should also have remained safe.

Data&Settings are much easier to schedule read/writes to/from but in
normal desktop usage the OS has many unpredictable read/writes, so while
data can be cached into swap & ram to appear like it's all being
accessed extremely fast the basic operations of the OS will appear
slower the further "/" is from the start of the drive.  Apparently
read/write speeds near the end of the drive can be down to as little as
half the read/write speed that you get at the beginning of the drive!
Given that data partitions are almost always going to be much marger
than OS space it's worth moving the data partition to the end of the
drive.  Of course in Windows it's extremely difficult to separate the
data from the OS - it takes some major hacking of the infamous registry.

Windows really needs to be near the start of the drive as it suffers
very badly from speed issues.  However, your hardware is unusual in
needing the boot sector to be within the first 1024Mb of space on your
hard-drive.  Given that linux-swap is so small and yet has such a huge
effect on performance (unless your ram is over 2Gb & over 4Gb swap
becomes mostly irrelevant) i thought it was well worth pushing Windows
back a little more in order to get a significant performance boost for
linux while hardly affecting Windows at all :)  If you have to wait 2hrs
for something you want to enjoy more benefit than just fixing a problem
so fine tuning the performance of the system seemed like a good plan :)
Putting sda6 in front of sda5 wont have a huge effect because it wont
have moved sda6 all that much closer to the front of the drive but you
might notice some slight performance increase under certain conditions
such as when you open and close a whole batch of different apps randomly
all at the same time.

Windows also uses swap but it eschews the linux-swap partition approach
and instead keeps a file called "pagefile.sys" which defaults to being
able to change size and so it gets heavily fragmented and Windows
Defragmenters can't defragment system files like that!  Also if you have
3 different Windows apps open that all need the same library then each
app will open a separate version of that library and shove the all into
swap.  In linux that library would have been separated out of the apps
and the 3 apps can happily share it so it only needs to be opened once.
This also has advantages if that library needs updating - only the 1
version of the library needs to be updated and then all 3 apps benefit.
Anyway, that's one reason that Window's uses so much more ram than linux
and that's one reason why Windows is so much slower - ram gets too full
faster in Windows.

Ooops, lol - this was meant to be a short post!
Please let me know if you can boot into both Ubuntu & Windows :)
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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