Dual-booting Windows 7 and Mint 14 with “something else” option

Question

I would like to do a dual boot of Windows 7 and Mint 14 on my Acer netbook which already has Windows 7 Pro 64-bit installed on an 1 TB hard drive.

I have already shrunk the Windows 7 partition to 330 G and the other partition I want to install Mint 14 on.

The problem is that I would like to install Mint with the "something else option". If I'm giving Mint a 600GB partition, I don't know what size I should make the following:

• Swap - I have 4GB of RAM, should I make this 2GB and should it be at beginning or end of partition?
• /
• /boot
• /home

I think those are the 4 main partitions I will need to allocate space to. But if I'm leaving anything out please feel free to point it out.

Answer 1

Your partition sizes might vary with your needs, but I would go with:

• 30 GB for / (in case you want to install large applications - e.g. games).

• slightly more than 4 GB for swap should be enough in case you want hibernation (suspend to disk).

• /boot is usually not needed (I haven't had a /boot partition in quite a while), but it can be small (128 MB should be enough)

• Then, dedicate the rest of the disk to /home - or, better, have a small (~10 GB) /home and a larger partition where you store data. This larger partition can be NTFS if you want to share files with your Windows install.

This should be enough to get things going; if you in the future see that the partitions are too small, you can resize them.