I'm planning to install Ubuntu Desktop 14.04 alongside an existing Windows 8.1 installation (following the guide on Installing Ubuntu Alongside a Pre-Installed Windows with UEFI).
I've partitioned my hard disk as follows at the moment:
- 1000MB healthy recovery partition
- 260MB healthy EFI system partition
- 1000MB healthy OEM partition
- ~427GB NTFS healthy (boot, page file, crash dump, primary) (Windows 8.1; C:)
- ~16GB unallocated
- 450MB healthy recovery partition
- ~439GB NTFS healthy primary partition (B:)
- 25GB NTFS healthy primary partition, don't want to touch it, it's the Lenovo partition (D:)
- 20GB healthy recovery partition
I probably can shrink the C-disk at the end and make a new partition of at least around 40GB.
If possible, it would be my preference to create a new partition there and install Ubuntu on that one. That way, I keep about half the disk for the B-disk, without any installation, so I can use it for backups.
However, I'm not sure if 40GB will be enough if I would install a lot of additional software (would it?). There will not be any data there as I will put it all on B:. Would it be possible to have the ubuntu base installation in one partition and all additional software on another one?
If that's possible, I assume that 16GB is more than enough for the base installation. Is this correct? Then I don't have to shrink the C-disk. In the guide I linked earlier, they say at least 8GB, but better 20GB.