Athelwulf said:
Here's the partition scheme I've worked out for my harddrive:
Total harddrive capacity: 76.2GB
Windows XP NTFS primary partition: 20GB
Mandriva 2006 primary partition: 10GB
Linux swap partition: 1GB
FAT32 partition: 45.2GB
That's a lot of space you've reserved for your FAT32 partition. FAT's good for sharing between the OS's, but other than that I don't recommend you use it too much. It lacks basic features like access permissions that both EXT and NTFS support. If you want to compare, my partitioning looks like this:
102 MB ext2, Fedora Core, mounted on /boot
5 GB FAT32, with Windows 98 installed.
40 GB NTFS, with Windows 2000 installed.
50 GB ext3, Fedora Core, mounted on /
20 GB ext3, Fedora Core, mounted on /home
5 GB ext3, Fedora Core, mounted on /var
2 GB Linux swap.
I find I don't really need to share much between the two OS's - since most of the space on both OS's is large, platform dependent apps, eg. games.
I believe someone mentioned that an additional Linux partition for /home was a good idea, for the reason that doing a fresh install of either Mandriva or another distro won't wipe out my settings and documents. I have a feeling that would be useful for stuff that Windows can't do anything with and that I'd have to keep within Mandriva, if that sort of thing applies. Does that need to be worked into this scheme somehow, or will this current plan do?
It's up to you. I think having a separate home partition is a good idea for the reason you mentioned, but you'd have to find space for it, create the partition, transfer all your files there, and mount it on /home.
Also, concerning my swap: I hope to double my memory soon, meaning I'd have 512MB. Using the RAM-times-two rule of thumb, I have a suitable swap partition. But would it cause me trouble later on in the off chance that I ever need to upgrade to a gigabyte of RAM? Is it bad to have a swap partition that's the same size as your RAM?
It won't cause any problems; it just makes sense to have more swap than RAM.