You have finally taken the great decision. You are going to install this OS you have heard so many about, Linux! However you want to keep your windows installation untouched as well. In this guide I’ll explain to you how you can partition your hard disk drive in order to make the partitions that you will later need for installing Linux. Specifically if you follow this guide you’ll have to install GRUB in the MBR of your first hard disk.
** It is a good idea to have a back up of your data just in case you do something wrong and accidentally you erase a partition you shouldn’t. As you see the procedure is simple and if you carefully do the changes there will be no problem!
First of all how many partitions are you gonna need and of what type. Generally Linux needs 2 partitions. One for / and one for swap. But what are / and swap? Linux file system is function specific which means that files and folders are organized according to their functionality. For example, all executables are in one folder, all devices in another, all libraries in another and so on. / or ‘root’ is the base of this file system. All the other folders are under this one. Very generally speaking imagine / as C:. Swap is a partition that will be used as virtual memory. If there is no more available RAM a Linux computer will use an area of the hard disk, called swap, to temporarily store data. In other words it is a way of expanding your computers RAM. Of course swap is slower than RAM, but in many cases it does its job. In our example guide we are going to use one more partition. This will be used for /home. /home is the place that all our personal data and configurations are being kept. It is a good idea to make a separate partition for /home because if you have to format your Linux distribution you won’t lose your personal data. They are all kept saved in another partition. So if you reinstall Linux you will retain your initial configuration as well!
Now, how much space we will need for each partition. Of course it depends on how much data we will keep in each one of them. For / about 10GBs are pretty good. Here I have used just 5GBs. Next for /home I have used 2GBs. You can calculate how much personal data you will store and make your decision. Finally swap. Some years ago swap should be the double size of our computers RAM. Nowadays if you have more than 256MB of RAM a swap partition of 512MB is fine.
Finally what type of file system we will need? NTFS? No. FAT32? No again. Linux supports many different file systems, such as ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs and others. For our / and /home partitions we will use ext3. It’s very common. And for Swap we will use swap type!
But enough with the theory. Let’s move on to partitioning!
Here I have used ‘Partition Magic 8.05’. However there are many other programs, freeware or not, for this job. The idea is the same.
As you can see in picture 1 my computer has 3 hard disks. We will use one of the two partitions of the third hard disk drive, partition J: As you can see in this picture it is formatted as NTFS (NT File System) and it’s size is 35.126,5MB We won’t use all of it’s space. We choose 'Create a new partition' from the Pick a Task... menu.
The wizard starts and we press ‘Next’
We select the disk where the new partition will be created, in our case it’s the 3rd one.
Then we choose the location of the new partition. After the old partition is the recommended.
And then we choose from which partition we will take the needed space. As I’ve said before I’ll use partition J:.
Now we’ll have to choose the partition size, and File System. I have set its size to 5GB Anything over this is fine. It depends on the distro and on the packages you are going to install later. 10GB is fairly enough. The chosen File System is ext3.
As you can see in the following picture, the new partition is ready and waiting to be applied.
The partition we made here will be used for placing (mounting) the / folder during our Linux installation. Remember that!
Now, we press again 'Create a new partition' and we choose again the 3rd disk.
Again we place the new partition after *: This time it is mentioned as * because we haven’t yet created the previous partition.
After that we select J: partition for resizing and gaining the wanted space.
This will be the partition for /home (remember that also!). Here I have used only 2GBs for storing my personal stuff. If you think you need more space, just add it. Again we choose ext3 File System, and we press 'Next'.
We confirm that our choices are correct and we press 'Finish'.
As we can see, in disk 3 we have one more partition and more operations pending.
We press again 'Create a new partition'. Now we will create the partition used as SWAP.
Again we select disk 3.
The new partition is set to be created after *:
And the space will be taken from partition J.
512MB are enough for the SWAP partition. Its File System should be Linux Swap
Confirm your choices and press 'Finish'.
As you can see, now we have 3 new partitions in disk 3 and 10 operations pending. Ready? Press the 'Apply' button.
And apply changes.
The progress may take a while..
When you see the ‘All operations completed’ message just press 'OK'.
As you can see, disk 3 is now partitioned and waiting for Linux to be installed. (Info on that on a later guide!) Enjoy!