New harddisk partitioning help

So I got this new 500 gig harddisk that I need help partioning with. Kinda planning to multi-boot with windows and perhaps ubuntu (still contemplating). What would be the ideal partition sequence for this?

Primary (windows) - Primary (ubuntu?) - Extended (for data)

Is that good?

Another question is can ubuntu or other distros read/write to the data partition if it is formatted as NTFS?

 

I just did mine as seen in the ss. I had my system and data backup partitions, so i had ~ 30GB remaining. You can have only a max of 4 partitions so you can see after I created the root partition, an extended partition was necessary to accomodate the swap and /Home partitions. The root and Home partitions I formatted in ext4 using a Gparted live cd. I use Partition Wizard disk to format/resize the Windows partitions. Ignore the 3.14 MB "Unallocated" partition. Not important.

BTW, I placed the Grub in the Linux root partition (sda3). This way I can use Windows boot manager to handle which O/S i want to run at boot. I used Windows EasyBCD to add the grub file to the startup options.

I don't know about this.

 

Most (if not all) distros should be able to read/write to NTFS without problems. As for formatting drives into NTFS, installing the ntfsprogs package solves that problem.

 

I think you can do it from a live cd as well.

 

Wouldn't it be a better layout to have windows and linux partitions on the first and second partitions of the harddisk and push the data partition to the last slot?

 

No reason to waste a primary partition on Ubuntu, you can go with logical.
Mrk

 

So I bumped into a slight problem Apparently my partition manager cannot format to ext3/ext4 so can I just allocate a logical partition for a later linux install and let the live cd format and repartition it later to ext4?

Code:

[------------------------- Hard disk ----------------------------]
[-- Primary --][------------------- Extended --------------------]
[-- windows --][-- linux --][----------- data storage -----------]

Better yet, can I just leave some unformatted space for a later linux installation? Will the live CD be able to see this unformatted space?

 

I could have used Partition Wizard to slide the data part over to the right, then place Linux to the right of the Windows active part, but it didn't matter to me at the time. Not sure if it's any advantage anyways?

 

Well thanks everyone for the tips. New hd all fine and settled now, I hope
Now to browse and decide on which distro to use, which will definitely take a while cos of bandwidth limitations.

 

Good to see! Maybe try Mint

BTW, I decided to slide the backup part over, then re-create the linux parts to the right of the Windows System part. Too bad my backed up Linux parts wouldn't work in them...grrrr Oh well, live and learn. Anyways, good news is after re-installing Mint I can now see the Windows and backup parts from Linux. Before I had some sort of mount errors