Partition sizes for windows and linux

[Blue_Gundam2002]

I have a 20 and a 40 gb hard drive on my computer. I plan I reformating them because I'm having some truble with windows. I plan on installing Windows 98se and either Mandrake Linux 9.1 or Best Linux 2000. I need to have a partion for windows and one for linux obviously. I also want to have two others, one for music which I have alot of and another for everything els. I cant decide what sizes I need the partions to be, anyone have any sugestions?

[bell_kicks]

yeah, have a partition about 10gig for windows, 30 gig for "everything else" , 25gig for linux and 15 gig for linux swap.............that should do

[Blue_Gundam2002]

I've herd people metion swap space before, but what is it for?

[aym]

Linux uses a special partition for swap or virtual memory.
You only need ~500MB for swap.

[kilgoretrout]

The old rule of thumb was that your swap partition should be twice your ram. With todays high memory configurations, that's no longer true. Unless you have some unusually heavy memory requirements swap should not be greater than 500 to 700MB and at that you'll rarely use but a fraction of it if you have more than 500MB of ram. For your 128MB ram config, make your swap 256MB. Fully loaded linux distros usually don't need more than 10GB, particularlly were you have most of your hard data on other partitions like your planning. Install win98 first, then linux. Also, linux loves ram. High ram with a modest cpu will usually outperform fast processor with modest ram. if it's in your budget, I'd recommend upgrading your ram to 256MB.