Dual Booting on the e6400: Part One – Partitioning

I’ve decided to make my dual boot guide a three-part post, to make things easier to follow. I’ll be covering the partitioning scheme I chose, and the other options available to users in this post. Part two will cover the Windows XP setup, and part three will cover the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) setup. While these are meant to be guides for configuring the Dell Latitude e6400, the partitioning and Ubuntu posts should be applicable to any system.

My first reformatting run, I partitioned my drive the way most people new to Linux probably do, with a NTFS partition for Windows, and Ext3 / and swap partitions for Ubuntu. Later, I happened upon this Psychocats article, and decided to add an additional partition for shared data. The advantage here is that future reformatting or upgrading is made easier by not having to move files off the laptop, or, in the case of Ubuntu, by also being able to save your configuration settings. With software like NTFS-3G to allow NTFS read/write in Ubuntu, or FS-Driver/Ext2 IFS to allow Ext2/3 read/write in Windows, there was little reason to use FAT with its limitations. Both pieces of software are pretty stable, and performance has been good during my one month of use, not having encountered any performance hiccups yet.

The two options available besides FAT were to either have a shared NTFS partition mounted in Ubuntu with NTFS-3G (comes with Intrepid Ibex), or a shared Ext3 partition as /home, and mounted in Windows with FS-Driver. The general opinion in a few forums I visited seemed to be that, with performance being about equal, the more important factor was which OS one plans to use more. In my case, while I planned to use Windows for more intensive things like photo editing, Ubuntu would be my go-to day-to-day OS. With that in mind, I chose to go the shared Ext3 route, partitioning my 160 GB drive as: 20 GiB NTFS Windows | 117 GiB Ext3 /home | 10 GiB Ext3 / | 1 GiB swap. Instead of just mounting /home via FS-Driver* though, I also mounted my Windows partition in Ubuntu, in order to share my Pidgin logs between the two systems, not wanting to deal with symlinking in XP.

* Important thing to note about FS-Driver: it doesn’t allow the mounting of filesystems with inodes greater than 128 bytes – unfortunately, Ubuntu switched to 256 byte inodes with Intrepid Ibex, and doesn’t have an option to change this during installation. There are two ways around this for those who plan to use FS-Driver with Intrepid (assuming this is a clean install – those upgrading won’t encounter this issue). The method recommended on several forums is to partition using a Hardy Heron (8.04) Live CD and GParted, and then to complete the installation with Intrepid. I won’t be covering this, as I ran into the inode issue after I had completed the install, and was forced to go with the more convoluted method of backing up /home and reformatting with mkfs. I’ll cover this in part three as part of the Intrepid setup for those who prefer to do things the hard way (or can’t get their hands on a copy of Hardy).