How should I partition my disk for dual boot between Windows 7 and Ubuntu?

Here are the facts and my use cases.

1. Hard Drive has a 1TB (terabytes) capacity.

On Windows, I will use the computer for:

• Developing Software. I will need to have installed Mercurial, Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008 Express.




• Gaming. I will install Steam and with it my games.

On Linux, I will use the computer for:

• Developing Rails 3 applications.




• General usage and viewing of media (music, videos, movies, etc).

I'm thinking I would first install Windows 7 and set my Drive C to about 40GB.

But how should I partition the rest of it? I'm afraid that if I tell Ubuntu to "use the rest of the disk" I won't be able to view the contents of the "linuxy" partitions. I think they use EXT right? Can windows view files in EXT4?

Answer

i used to solve it with my 1 TB HDD as the following

• first format and install windows 7 on 100 GB (40 is not enough for developer but you are free to choose)




• from windows 7 right click on "computer" then "manage" then "disk management" then create a second 100 GB partition.




• install Linux on the second partition (format it as EXT3 or EXT2 i don't prefer EXT4 because i always try to avoid compatibility hell).




• format the rest of the partition (1 TB-200 GB) as NTFS. why NTFS? because you can use it on both systems with no one problem(windows CANT view files on EXT file system). auto-mount it on Linux if you like(personally i like to use ntfs-3g tool).

PS: don't install Linux then windows because windows will erase the Linux's boot loader(like grub) and so you will run to a problem and you will have to re-install your boot loader.

PPS: you can modify your boot loader configuration to choose your default operating system.