Size of W7 partition?

[emeraldgirl08]

I'm going to take the plunge and do a multi-boot installation of Fedora and W7. I'm wondering about partition sizes. I don't know if 12gb is big enough for W7. I'm going to do 8 gb for Fedora. There are intricacies with dividing up the various segments ie. /root, /home, etc. that I wouldn't even know where to begin on those.

My plan was to use Gparted to create one NTFS partition for W7 and am not quite sure how to make the other two. Do I have to choose a partition type right away for the two blank partitions??? If so what would be good for Fedora and another Linux distro???

The HDD I'm playing with is pretty small. It is a 40 gb (around 37.1) 7200 rpm drive. This is going into a desktop that has a 232 gb XP pro installed so there would be separate drives.

I'm doing this out of boredom and hands-on experience! Any suggestions guys?

[mgo]

I'm going to take the plunge and do a multi-boot installation of Fedora and W7. I'm wondering about partition sizes. I don't know if 12gb is big enough for W7.

I would give Windows 7 20 gig for the all the system files, pagefile, etc, and a little "elbow room" for running defrag, and then any of your programs that you need, etc.

[smidgley]

On the one ThinkPad I have running Windows 7, the Windows folder by itself is 15.4GB.

[emeraldgirl08]

Argh!

Why does the min. installation have to be so huge? I've read various posts of people getting by on 12gb. Let me give a list of specs that my sis' comp has:

232 gb HDD
Core2Duo
256mb Geforce Nvidia card (can use system RAM for 512 mb)
Gigabyte motherboard
2 gb RAM

And lastly the extra 40 gb HDD. Yeah it's small and probably will only have enough room for the W7. Any chance of a linux distro fitting in there?

[mgo]

Argh!

Why does the min. installation have to be so huge? I've read various posts of people getting by on 12gb. ?

Since prices are so reasonable, perhaps you could buy a larger drive, like one of the newer 320 gig units with 7200 rpm platter speed and get sufficient capacity and good speed, as well.

[emeraldgirl08]

@mgo- I 'd really like to do that but I got that drive for a deal and I don't have the dollars right now. I got school coming up and my job is part-time work. I guess just for now I could spare 20 gb for W7 and then 8 gb for one of the linux distros. I know they (linux distros) don't demand a huge minimum. My Jaunty shows disk usage around 3 gb so that's a pretty good indicator for linux.

That leaves me with around 7 gb for whatever. I'm doing a real juggling act but that's okay. I'm having fun learning

[mgo]

@mgo- I 'd really like to do that but I got that drive for a deal and I don't have the dollars right now. I got school coming up and my job is part-time work. I guess just for now I could spare 20 gb for W7 and then 8 gb for one of the linux distros. I know they (linux distros) don't demand a huge minimum. My Jaunty shows disk usage around 3 gb so that's a pretty good indicator for linux.

That leaves me with around 7 gb for whatever. I'm doing a real juggling act but that's okay. I'm having fun learning

Well, if you're really squeezed for partition space you might consider installing Windows 7, then disabling Hibernation, and the Pagefile and see if the operating system still runs OK. (results can vary) Hibernate and Pagefile can give back three gig or more in real estate. With Windows 7 thusly trimmed, you would have more room for your installed programs.

[DataCabbitKSW]

Base install of Windows 7 if you put in all the bits is about 7-16GB. You will essentially want a 20GB drive to but the OS on at very least. This will also give it some breathing room for a few programs and a swap file. If you are very selective about what you install (turn off any options that you think you may not use when doing a custom install) then you can shrink it down _A LOT_. There are some tuning guides over on TechNet that go through a lot of the under-the-hood stuff so you can make decisions on what to include and what to toss out: http://tinyurl.com/832nco

[dsvochak]

The "official" system requirements:
http://windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements

[emeraldgirl08]

Okay this is how my installation went:

Killdisked my 40 gb hard drive.

Installed Windows 7.

Used Gparted to resize the partition to 20gb.

I really wanted to install Fedora but got some I/O error. Used Ubuntu 9.04 instead.

Didn't know how to install it after the Windows 7 partition. A storm seemed to be approaching so fearing the electricity would shut off I hurried along.

I expanded the Windows 7 partition back to around 37 gb. This time on installation of Jaunty I chose to install it "alongside Vista"- that's what Jaunty calls Windows 7. I moved the slider down to 20 gb for Windows and the rest was all Jaunty's partition.

Okay. Now before I completed my manual partitioning there was something I remembered reading about start-up and Windows. I remembered something about how Windows could not see Linux. I remember that b/c when I am on my laptop I cannot see anything from Jaunty on my Ultrabay drive- just the FAT32 partition is all. Remembering that I clicked on advanced and got an option to install a boot loader.

The question was where???

I presumed that if Windows could not see Linux but Linux could see Windows- I installed the boot loader into the Windows boot partition.

It worked

Now all I have to figure out is how to add the XP pro to the boot menu. I have a feeling it's going to be difficult. I read that Windows does not bear Windows easily!

[cparker]

Emerald Girl:

You installed Windows 7 on your t30? How did installation go and how does it work? In answer to one of your questions, if you install Windows 7 on a hard disk that has another Windows OS on it such as XP, when you boot up Microsoft will present you with a screen where you can choose which of the Windows versions you wish to load. I did this on an old desktop that still had W2000 installed.

I have lots of space on the new 80 gb drive on the t30 and I could easily install another OS besides XP.

[emeraldgirl08]

Haven't tried that yet Cparker!

This scenario is a triple boot that involves an IDE and SATA drive in a desktop. It's probably not difficult once you can get your head wrapped around boot configurations and the like.

I've just been busy and all this stuff about hd0,1 and ext3 is wigging me out!

lol. There are people who have installed W7 in their T30. I also have an 80gb in my T30 and once my R52 arrives I will defintely play around with OS'

Due to limited VRAM I know that aero would be disabled automatically and I'd manually cut the graphical-effects to minimum as a supplement.

[cparker]

Emerald Girl:

Ok. I'll pass on the W7 for the T30, then, at least until I find out more about how it went with others; particularly drivers and such that are t30 specific and that don't load automatically with the installation. Just want to try it sometime on the t30 while it's "free" (at least until April or so when RC1 self destructs).

Congratulations on the R52 that's coming soon. Just from reading about it, it looks pretty powerful, particularly in the graphics dept.