Michael's ArchLinux Installation

[trev.saunders at gmail.com]

Hi,

ok, drives can have up two 4 primary partitions, of which 1 can be an extended partition.  An extended partition can have some reasonably large (16 or 64) logical partitions, I don't really remember.  Any way, so you have primary partitons and logical, the primary partitions are numbered 1-4 and the logical ones start at 5.  How you partition a given disk comes down to preference and use.  Another thing worth pointing out here is that above the primary and logical partitions bios can support linux can have what is called logical volumes, this is a bit more complicated, so you might decide not to bother, but it gives you some really nice features like dynamically resizeable sections of disk.  You will certainly want 1 partition for   windows, and atleast 1 for linux I'd suggest  2 1 for the root file system with the system files, and second /home for your personal stuff.  You'll probably also want a partition for swap, since you only have 256Mb of ram, if this were a server you might be able to get away without swap, but for a personal machine I would suggest having a fair bit of swap.  Since this gets you to 4 partitions, it would probably make ense to put some on a extended paritition.

HTH
Trev