Advice on partitioning hard drive

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illusioned
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Advice on partitioning hard drive

Post by illusioned » Mon Mar 22, 2010 6:07 am

Hi! guys

I wanted to an advice on how to partition my hard drive which is 160GB and 4GB RAM were i need it to have dual booting which is window vista and Linux

And within vista i would like to install two virtual machines.How should i partition my hard drive?

Arxo Clay
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Re: Advice on partitioning hard drive

Post by Arxo Clay » Tue Mar 23, 2010 12:58 am

As far as the dual booting is concerned, most Linux flavors have an inbuilt partitioning software that will handle the partitioning when you install it. Also you might want to take a look at disk partitioning software available on the net. Partition Magic comes to mind, but I am not sure as to whether it is free any more.

Virtual Machines I guess, is a distinct topic.
Some snappy googling and I found this: http://vistasupport.mvps.org/creating_a ... vmware.htm

Hope that helps!

19bab79
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Re: Advice on partitioning hard drive

Post by 19bab79 » Tue Mar 23, 2010 2:06 pm

gparted is a free partition editor. linux doesn't really need a whole lot of space depending on what you are using it for. vista takes up a lot of hard drive space as well. depending on which version of vista you are installing it could try to use over 15gb (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/window ... ments.aspx).

if it were me, i would install minimum requirements for vista and then give the rest for linux. then use linux for the virtual machines. i am sure experiences vary, but i always had a problem with vista wanting to lock up when i booted virtual machines in it. that was a long time ago though, and might not be an issue anymore.

you can always resize your partitions later if you decide you haven't given enough to one operating system.

Dark Nova
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Re: Advice on partitioning hard drive

Post by Dark Nova » Fri Mar 26, 2010 5:05 am

if you're looking to partition, I cant possibly recommend bootit NG any more highly, tis free easy to use and has never failed me, will also allow resizing of partitions with an OS on.

I agree with 19bab79 though, I always find virtual machnes in Linux a whole lot more stable.
Sometimes insanity is the only sanity left

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