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Context: I'm currently adding an SSD to my old laptop, in order to boost it. I'd use this opportunity to fresh re-install my both OS, and give a try to a new distro.

I've now two drives of 250Gio each: /dev/sda (SSD) and /dev/sdb (physical drive).

I plan to use the solid state drive for the 3 OS (Win7, Ubuntu 16.04 and Fedora 24), and the physical one for my (shared) files.

Question: How many partitions (physical or logical) are needed on my SSD, assuming that I start from a void disk?

(All my OS and data are currently on the physical drive. I'll empty, format, and then refill it with files once OS install is done.)

My current guess is:

- Primary 1 |   1 Gio |  ?   | MBR, Grub, etc.
- Primary 2 |  80 Gio | ntfs | Win 7
- Primary 3 | 130 Gio | ext4 | ...
       * secondary 3.a. | 60 Gio | Ubuntu
       * secondary 3.b. | 60 Gio | Fedora
- Primary 4 |  10 Gio | swap | swap

(I've 8Gio RAM, and will add some empty space between paritions in order to be able to extend this or that later if space is needed.)

ebosi
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1 Answers1

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Assuming legacy MBR; at a minimum, 3; one for each OS.

Linux only requires 1 partition, you can have the /boot and / on the same partition when using MBR, grub and ext3/4 or a few other filesystems.

Windows I believe only requires one partition as well, but generally creates some recovery partitions if you allow it to format the entire disk. I am not sure, offhand, how much control you have over this with the various different version of windows.

You do not need a separate /boot (in your example what looks like Primary1), in fact I would let each distro have/maintain their own /boot (this will stop one overwriting anothers kernel). Swap partitions are optional, you may not need one at all or you can use swap files instead (which are generally more flexible as they are easier to resize) or you can keep is as a separate partition.

Also, there is no practical difference between a primary and extended partition. So if you are worried about the number of partitions you can simple create 1 primary partition, and use as many extended partitions as you need within that.

You are still free to create as many additional logical partitions as you require.

If you are willing/are able to move to UEFI you can make use of the more modern GPT partition table which does not have the 4 primary partition limit allowing you to effectively create as many partitions as you realistically require. You require one EFI partition, and then at a minimum one per OS but have the freedom to create as many more as you need.

Michael Daffin
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    side note: do not share the swap partition between linux installations if you are going to use hibernation. see http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/287765/how-will-hibernation-work-in-two-linux-installations-sharing-a-swap-partition – Serge Sep 07 '16 at 01:19