How many and how should I set up my partitions?

Question

I have a 1 Tb HDD and an 8 Gb SSD. I currently have Windows 8.1 installed on the HDD (no partitions yet), and plan on installing Ubuntu 14.04.

A coworker of mine mentioned that I ought to have a partition of ~100GB of SWAP, which I can understand (we work with large amounts of data). Then, I wonder about the need/use of some sort of partition where both Ubuntu and Windows can access the data.

And do I want to put an OS on the SSD? I'm using Windows for gaming and Ubuntu for emulation and big number crunching.

Finally, is an update to Windows 10 going to absolutely wreck my Ubuntu installation, or should I be fine on that front?

Thanks for any advice or direction.

the rule of thumb I have always heard is swap size = to ram size — wlraider70, Jul 01 '15 at 23:13
Not really a solution but an advice. You can set up a "Gaming virutal machine" but that will take a bit effort and has some requirements. I used the tutorial here. If you read this and worry that you have to start the vm as root, don't worry there is a way not to do. — Marton, Jul 01 '15 at 23:20
@wlraider70: That rule of thumb is for desktop and moderate server work loads only, not scientific computing. — David Foerster, Jul 02 '15 at 01:44
possible duplicate of How to use manual partitioning during installation? — David Foerster, Jul 02 '15 at 01:45

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 01 '15 at 21:23

The partitioning scheme can be anyway you like it.Just be sure you do not delete your Windows partitions when creating or modifying ones for Ubuntu. Paying attention will help with this.

Please take a look at: Partitioning Schemes - Ubuntu Help for some additional info regarding how to partition your machine. The following set up is how I have three of my machines running.

I have seven partitions while dual booting Windows 8.1, they are as follows:

/dev/sda1 - 2GiB (boot partition /EFI that windows created automatically during it's installation)

/dev/sda2 - 350GiB - (Windows partitions with install)

/dev/sda3 - 100GiB "Extended Partition" (since you can only have four primary partitions on a system)

/dev/sda5 - 4GiB "Linux-Swap" (usually you only need to have half the amount of your ram for swap. Since I have 8GiB of Ram I used 4GiB for Swap)

/dev/sda6 - 20GiB "/" (root partition)

/dev/sda7 - 70GiB "/home" (I have a separate partition for my home folder)

For my root "/" and "/home" partitions I have formatted them to the Btrfs (Betree), file system as this runs best for me. Ext4 will work just fine as well.

Then you can install Ubuntu along side of Windows.

For your question regarding if Windows 10 will corrupt Ubuntu - It should not. I had upgraded to Windows 10 preview while I have Ubuntu installed and nothing was harmed. I always recommend reading over the official help documentation at Ubuntu.com for installation and partitioning.

To answer your question on whether or not you can create a partition that both Windows and Ubuntu can use, I am not sure. You could always create one then try to mount it on both Windows as well as Ubuntu, but I am unsure how this would work due to the way Windows and Ubuntu handles files systems. I guess it would be similar to having a network drive that you could see on both OS's. Just not 100% sure.

Thanks for the detailed response! The only question I have would be what to do with the SSD - will either OS be able to use it for fast downloads, or would Windows benefit a lot more from being directly on it? Or am I entirely wrong here? — markymark, Jul 02 '15 at 00:10

How many and how should I set up my partitions?

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