Partition scheme for Vista/ Ubuntu dual boot

[Powderhound]

I'm going to be installing the OSes on my new rig today, and I have a Samsung 750GB F1 HDD to play with. I want a dual boot system with Windows Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu 8.04, and I'm not entirely sure about how I should partition my disk, wit particular regard to the Vista portion. I was intending to have one partition for the OS (preferably as small as possible, so that the next partition is as close to the outer edge as possible for increased speed), the next one for games and other software (100GB again, I suppose) and a documents partition (The size of this will depend upon the sizes I choose for the other partitions,as I will simply split excess space between it, the Ubuntu home partition and the share partition). Finally, I would have the various Ubuntu partitions.
However, I'm not sure how much space I should allocate for the OS partition. I don't want to waste space, but I nor do I want to be in a situation where a few months down the line the partition is too small and I'm left up the creek. What do you guys suggest?

[directhex]

vista consumes about 12 gig of space for 32-bit, 15 gig for 64-bit, with no apps. that's your first thing to consider. i wouldn't want to run vista on a partition without at least 75 gig of space in it (consider some games are now asking for more than 20 gig of install space).

ubuntu will ask for about 3 gig of space, most of which will be in /usr - if you really want to partition things a lot (and i don't really see the advantage) then ensure that whichever partition /usr is on has a couple of gig to work with (assuming you never want to install fat lumps like ut2004), that /tmp has some empty space, and that you have lots of space in /home and /var. or say balls to it and just make one fat partition (with a swap partition after it to allow suspend-to-disk)

and in either case, put vista in front of ubuntu on disk, and install vista first

[Powderhound]

vista consumes about 12 gig of space for 32-bit, 15 gig for 64-bit, with no apps. that's your first thing to consider. i wouldn't want to run vista on a partition without at least 75 gig of space in it (consider some games are now asking for more than 20 gig of install space).

ubuntu will ask for about 3 gig of space, most of which will be in /usr - if you really want to partition things a lot (and i don't really see the advantage) then ensure that whichever partition /usr is on has a couple of gig to work with (assuming you never want to install fat lumps like ut2004), that /tmp has some empty space, and that you have lots of space in /home and /var. or say balls to it and just make one fat partition (with a swap partition after it to allow suspend-to-disk)

and in either case, put vista in front of ubuntu on disk, and install vista first

Isn't it possible to have a separate partition for software, and if so, couldn't I give Vista a partition of, say, 25GiB and then have a larger partition of approx 100GiB for software and games?

[directhex]

in theory, yeah, it's possible. and most apps these days will allow you to do it and still work. but it won't really gain you much - because the apps will be spreading confetti into other places like the registry, it's not like you can just format your windows partition & have all your apps still be fine afterwards; they'd still need reinstalling

[Powderhound]

I was thinking more along the lines of making it easier to defrag and optimise each partition for speed.

EDIT: Here is a preliminary plan (The numbers will obviously change as I won't have aa full 750GB to play with).

Partition| File System| Size
Vista| NTFS| 25000000000
Software| NTFS| 100000000000
Documents| NTFS| 150000000000
Share| FAT32| 316244000000
/| EXT3| 2000000000
/Boot| EXT3| 256000000
/Usr| EXT3| 3000000000
/Var| EXT3| 1500000000
/Tmp| EXT3| 2000000000
/Home| EXT3| 150000000000