Ubuntu – Partition Scheme Questions in Dual Boot Ubuntu/Windows installation

dual-bootext4ntfspartitioningsystem-installation

I just got a new laptop with Windows 8 and I am ready to install Ubuntu. I see the hard drive already has quite a few partitions, most of which seem related to Windows recovery.

See capture:
I am not allowed to post images, so I am including a link to the capture instead.
Partitions on my computer

I think I should probably avoid touching those partitions, if I want to keep the factory system recovery options. Any comments on this?

I see there is a partition marked as Active & Boot, a 300 MB FAT32 partition with type EFI System Partition. Is anyone familiar with this type of partition? When installing UBUNTU should I somehow use this partition for grub or something like that? If so, how would I do that?

The disk has 1000GB.
I am thinking I would like to:

  • Resize the main partition (Acer/NTFS) with Windows. Not sure what the minimum size should be. Is 80GB OK? Too small? Too large?

  • Use the freed up space to create the rest of partitions… But I think I will need to create an extended partition, because there are already too many partitions, am I right?

  • Create a Windows data partition (NTFS) with maybe 200-300 GB

  • Create an UBUNTU OS partition. EXT4 ok? Or is there a better filesystem for the OS? What about size? Maybe 50 GB? 100 GB?
  • Create a swap partition, maybe 16GB because that's the maximum RAM allowed in the system. Or maybe I can set it to exactly 8GB as the current size of RAM and resize later if needed?
  • Create a data partition for /home, with the remaining space (probably around 500-600 GB).

NOW, I am thinking I would like the /home partition to be visible to Windows. To do so I believe I would need to use NTFS as filesystem for that partition. Does this make sense at all? Maybe UBUNTU is more comfortable (faster access, etc) with EXT4 or other Linux filesystem and I would sacrificing performance? If a linux filesystem should be used is EXT4 the best or other?

Best Answer

You don't need to -- and in fact can't -- create an extended partition. This is because the disk uses the GUID Partition Table (GPT).

Using NTFS for /home is a bad idea at best, and impossible at worst, because you must be able to use Unix/Linux filesystem features in /home that NTFS doesn't provide. Instead, you should either use a Windows filesystem driver for a Linux filesystem or create some other non-/home partition for sharing files. (You could mount that partition within your home directory -- say, /home/user254803/shared -- if you wanted to.) I believe there are some decent ext2/3fs drivers for Windows, but I don't know how well they cope with ext4fs. Windows drivers for other filesystems are much more primitive or non-existent, AFAIK.

The 300MB FAT partition is an EFI System Partition (ESP), which holds boot loaders. Ubuntu should detect and use it automatically. (The Ubuntu installer refers to it as an "EFI boot partition" and treats it a little differently from other partitions.)

You may want to check my Web page on EFI installations and/or the Ubuntu community wiki on EFI to learn more on the subject. EFI is very different from BIOS in the boot stage, and the differences between MBR and GPT have implications (mainly no logical partitions), but in terms of Linux partitions and how to make room for Linux, it's pretty similar to any other installation -- the arguments for and against a separate /home partition, sizing issues, etc., are all the same as they are on a BIOS-based computer.

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