Partitioning drives

[Daniel Carrera]

Preston Smith wrote:
> I have a 30GB drive with XP on it and I would like to maintain a dual
> boot capability.  I also have a slave 6.0 GB drive on which I want to
> install Kubuntu
> 
> I think I should have a /home directory so that when 6.06 final comes
> out I can do a reinstall without losing my data

You don't need to do that. When Dapper final comes out you'd just type

sudo apt-get upgrade

And it would all be upgraded without losing data.

> I know very little about Linux so I am looking for guidance on what
> partitions to place on the Linux drive, their sizes, which should be
> bootable, logical or primary, what mount points to use, etc.

Linux is not very fuzzy about this sort of thing. It doesn't care if 
it's bootable for example. I think it doesn't care if one is primary, 
but I could be wrong. It's never wrong to make them primary, but I think 
you're making things too complicated by worrying about this.

As for size, a basic Ubuntu install takes about 2.2GB. For swap, 512MB 
will do. I have 1GB swap but that's because I have a 40GB disk. I have 
no idea how much you need for /home, that depends on what you put on it.

In my case I just have one big partition for everything (and another for 
swap). I've never had problems with that setup.

> In effect
> after looking at the Partitioning phase of the installation, I had no
> understanding about what I was doing so can someone walk me through the
> process as presented in the 6.06 installer or point me to a FAQ/HOWTO
> that provides a simple explanation about what has to be done

You can safely choose the defaults, as long as you don't overwrite the 
30GB disk you said you wanted to keep.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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