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After looking through a lot of different guides and information on this site and others, I have a basic idea of a partitioning scheme to use for a dual boot Ubuntu-Win7 machine but I'm not so clear about file systems. I have a UEFI-supported board and I'm going to use the GPT partition type. I'd like to check to see if I'm on the right track or not.

My basic idea is: (updated to show Windows-required MSR partition)

sda1- EFI/ESP    FAT32    0.25gb
sda2- / (root)   EXT4     20gb
sda3- (MSR)      ----     0.13gb
sda4- win C:     NTFS     30gb
sda5- win D:     NTFS     500gb
sda6- /home      EXT4     300gb
sda7- (swap)     ???      16gb

Now on my single physical 1TB hard drive this leaves about 100gb and change unallocated for any future OS experiments or to make a shared drive between Windows and Ubuntu using some other file system if I run into problems.

For my allocated space NTFS is of course a natively supported Windows file system and seems to be fairly stable on Ubuntu so it sounds like the best choice for my Win partitions. I briefly looked at ExFAT but it sounds like it doesn't have as good of support on either Ubuntu or Windows so NTFS wins out.

The Ubuntu situation is less clear. I'm probably not going to be doing a lot of access of Ubuntu files from the Windows side and since it seems that there is a significant performance difference between EXT3 and EXT4, I decided to go with 4. EXT3 has more support but it doesn't look like it's necessarily better support (i.e. you have to open up a separate program to access EXT3 files). There is at least decent EXT4 file support in the form of ExtFS for Windows which works with the standard file management tools, and if that doesn't work then I probably can save my files directly to the NTFS D: drive from Ubuntu. The Swap partition from what I understand is a special "swap" file system, but I really had trouble finding any info on it.

From what I understand, the order of the two larger drives (Win D: and Ubuntu /home) doesn't matter so much but I should keep the two system drives (Win C: and Ubuntu root) close to the UEFI/ESP partition. Nothing I read talked about the order of the Swap partition at all and I saw partition schemes with it towards the beginning or at the end, so I'm guessing its order doesn't matter either.

Is this a reasonable setup or is there anything I'm getting wrong (size/system)? Does it make sense to have a separate Ubuntu Home and Windows Programs/Media partition, or would it make more sense to combine them as a big happy NTFS family? I'll probably be installing different versions of the same program on the Windows and Ubuntu side (like Steam and Eclipse IDE for example), so my instinct is to keep them separate and avoid confusion. If I do choose to add in a separate partition that is primarily for cross-platform work, what would be the best file system - NTFS? Something else? Is there anything else I should be aware of compatibility-wise by using EXT4 instead of the older EXT3?

I'm going to be switching over to mostly using Ubuntu but keeping Windows for gaming. As a long-time Windows user I have approximately a billion questions about Ubuntu but I'm going to start with just the partition and file format scheme for now.

Alium Britt
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1 Answers1

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I will try to answer as many of your questions as I can:

Is this a reasonable setup or is there anything I'm getting wrong (size/system)?

What is reasonable for one user may not be for another. This is because we all use our computers for different purposes, and in different ways. As others have pointed out:

  • You probably wont need 16GB Swap. 2GB should be enough.
  • 30GB C: for Windows system partition may be too small.

However, these are your choices. The rest seems OK to me.

Does it make sense to have a separate Ubuntu Home and Windows Programs/Media partition, or would it make more sense to combine them as a big happy NTFS family?

You can't put the Ubuntu /home partition in the NTFS format. Ubuntu keeps its user configurations in the /home for each user. Each user has her ownership and read/write permissions. Ubuntu cannot use NTFS for storing ownership and permissions. It needs to be one of the Linux compatible partition formats, such as ext2, ext3, ext4, zfs, btfs, etc. As you know Windows on its own does not understand any of these partition formats. So it is best to keep them separate and use their respective native formats, NTFS for Windows, and ext4 for Ubuntu.

See I want to reformat my home partition from ext3 to ntfs for more on this.

If I do choose to add in a separate partition that is primarily for cross-platform work, what would be the best file system - NTFS? Something else?

I don't think you need a separate partition for cross-platform work, but if you do, it should be NTFS. You can share sda5 or D: in NTFS with Ubuntu. I recommend you create soft links of specific folders from sda5 (D:) to sda6 (/home). For example:

D:\user\[yourID_in_windows]\Java_Workspace can be soft-linked to /home/[yourID_in_Ubuntu]/Java_Workspace

See Do I need Intel Smart Response when installing Ubuntu? for an example of how to create soft-links of specific folders between two drives. The same commands can be used for creating soft links between NTFS and ext4 partitions. If you want you can keep all your music, video, etc. in D: and have links in your /home partition.

Is there anything else I should be aware of compatibility-wise by using ext4 instead of the older ext3?

ext4 is a mature partition format used by default in Ubuntu. You have nothing to worry about if you stick to ext4.

Hope this helps

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