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I have a 500GB SSD in which i would like to have both Windows and Ubuntu. My plan is to have something similar to this: Windows 8.1 and ubuntu 14.04 Uefi boot

  • an efi partition (created by windows installer) which will have Grub as bootloader
  • 150GB ntfs for Windows
  • 15GB ext4 for Ubuntu (root)
  • 35GB ext4 for Ubuntu (home)
  • ~8-16GB swap for Ubuntu (I have 16GB RAM)
  • ~284-292GB ntfs for Data shared for both Windows and Ubuntu

My current setup is

  • 200GB ntfs Windows

  • 300GB ntfs for Data

I plan to shrink both the Windows and the data partiton in order to achieve my desired plan.

My questions:

  1. Does the order of partitions matter? Does it matter if the ubuntu partitions are not at the end/beggining of the drive? Does the swap partition behaves better if its the last/first partition?

  2. Can I use the shared NTFS Data partition between windows and ubuntu without encountering problems?

  3. Do I have enough space for my ubuntu /home partition (thinking that I'll have access to the ntfs shared partition)?

Edit: Laptop, Asus N56jr, i7, 16Gb Ram, SSD samsung 850 evo 500gb

Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04

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  • What brand, model system? What version of Windows? If Windows 8 or later, you must make sure fast start-up is off as that is always on hibernation and it will also create issues on shared NTFS partition. Size of /home depends only on what data you may save in /home. If you are really storing all data in shared NTFS you do not need much for /home.
    – oldfred
    Jul 1, 2015 at 14:54
  • Edited to show model. Yes my plan is to have everything data related shared on one ntfs partition which would be around 300GB.
    – Cristian
    Jul 1, 2015 at 15:15
  • Ubuntu will boot so fast on SSD, that hibernation does not save you much if anything. My motherboard's UEFI has timer on fast boot that can be set. So I kept fast boot on, but set time to 3 sec so I can still get into UEFI. I also set 3 sec on grub. Or 6 sec of my total boot time of about 20 sec is my own delay settings. Logs say boot is about 6 sec, but that does not include everything.
    – oldfred
    Jul 1, 2015 at 17:04
  • My SSD is 120GB, I can only have * an efi partition (for windows) 85GB ntfs for Windows 20GB ext4 for Ubuntu (root) ~5GB ext4 for Ubuntu (swap) (I have 16GB RAM) Is this ok? Also what would be the install order: Windows 8 then Ubuntu or the other way around?
    – thednp
    Sep 7, 2015 at 16:28

2 Answers 2

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  1. If your disk uses MBR partition table, then both Windows and Linux root partitions should be in first 3 partitions on disk (if you want to use extended/logical partitions) or in first 4 partitions (but then you cannot use extended/logical partitions, because MBR is limited to max number of 4 "normal" partitions). If your disks uses GPT partition table, then the order of partitions doesn't matter. On SSD disks it also doesn't matter if your swap partition is first or last, SSD disks should read/write all data at the same speed.
  2. Yes, you can, but if you mount that partition on Linux, then hibernate Linux and start Windows, you may lose some data when you run Linux next time. You should remember to not start a system if some partition is mounted on another, hibernated system (Ext4 partitions are quite save, because Windows can't mount them without some 3rd party software).
  3. It depends on what you want to store in you home directory, but if you have most data on your NTFS partition, then it should be OK. Steam installs all the games to your home directory by default, so you should create a Steam Library on another partition and use it instead of default one.
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  • Okay. For question 2: would hibernating ubuntu lock my Shared data partition? I thought that it would only deal with the root and home partition. Can you provide an example where ubuntu hibernation would cause such issues?
    – Cristian
    Jul 1, 2015 at 14:21
  • @Cristian This post is wrong. Hibernation of Ubuntu will not lock anything in NTFS.
    – Pilot6
    Jul 1, 2015 at 15:20
  • @Pilot6 okay that makes sense. I would think that only root and /home would be part of the hibernation process. But for the sake of better understanding, can this scenario happen? Have Xampp installed on both windows and ubuntu and both installations to share the same htdocs (which would be on the ntfs shared data partition). If xampp is running in ubuntu and I hibernate would that cause the xampp in windows not to have access to htdocs?
    – Cristian
    Jul 1, 2015 at 15:25
  • @Cristian As far as I know, Ubuntu does not lock NTFS partitions on hibernate. But you can test it.
    – Pilot6
    Jul 1, 2015 at 15:31
  • Ubuntu won't lock any partition while hibernated, but Ubuntu may be in the middle of some operations on disk, when you hibernate your system and next time when it wakes up, it tries to resume previous operations, but data may be changed (especially Master File Table), because filesystem has been mounted on Windows in the meantime. Ubuntu may then write some wrong data to disk. You can see an example here (read the accepted answer): superuser.com/questions/39532/… Jul 1, 2015 at 15:41
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Your partitioning is reasonable.

  1. Order of partitions does not matter.

  2. Yes, you can.

  3. It depends on what you will install to Ubuntu /home partition. E.g. steam games are installed there. But generally it must be enough in most cases.

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