Hi!

I had my working PC with 2 OS

I divided my partition as follow:

20 G fat 16 (boot loader)
80 Ntfs Windows OS
80 Ntfs Files

and its 320 G the rest was for Linux OS

I used it for more than a year without logging in into Windows OS now I want the space.

I want to install Ubuntu as I like everything work and there is not of info on the net to get you going in not time.

I started with Debian and it was bad experience I had to do lot of manual to get simple things going!

But now I want to have another goal at it having Ubuntu as main and have debian and slackware as a second OS to boot up and mess around while I get up to speed and decide which to stay on.

What should be my set up partition for such as task?

My experience with windows show me I always best to have an important files on a sec partition in case the primary table fail you can still recovery the data, is that same case with ext4?

Is any danger to get my home directory folder Encrypted?

Thanks for you input!

Well, I have not run into those issues that you are describing with important data on different partitions etc... but personally I like to create partitions for specific uses, i.e. webserver stores all html files on a partition mounted as the www directory, home directory on a seperate partition, logs on a seperate partition... you get the idea. As far as partition failure goes, in my experience that indicates a disk problem and in my cases up to now always resulted in a disk having to be replaced, so there would be no saving data on a specific partition. I would recommend you switch to a raid system that does mirroring. This will better secure your data and then whether it is a partition or a whole disk that gives an issue, there is no worries about it. Just swap the problem disk and raid will rebuild.

For the partitions, just put in the ubuntu cd, start it up. Look for those three partitions delete them and create new ones to your liking. If you still want to use the old linux then do not touch the big partition. Later on you can use something like gparted to change the partitions if you like.

If you want to be able to easily span or change allocated sizes to mounted volumes, I recommend that you start using LVM. This way you can easily increase and decrease size of volumes that can span over multiple disks or partitions and as far as you are concerned, your home directory is just one directory, but it may actually exist as pieces of many different partitions or disks. Very flexible tool indeed. I use this at work on a machine that is pretty old but they keep dumping backups onto it and never want to buy new hardware. It started of with a single 200gb hardisk ages ago before I started working there and now holds eight disks. Has tons of space and all the disks are in a single volume so the backup folder just looks like one insanely big folder.

As far as encrypting your home folder goes, there is no danger to encryption unless you forget the password. Then you will have issues. But if the stuff you have on it is not company secrets or confidential, don't bother about encrypting. The only time when the encryption will be helpful is if you have a powered down laptop you forget in a coffee shop or if someone steals your hard drive and try to access files on it. So... choice is yours. Remember that the encryption you talk about is worthless if you leave the computer logged in and running, go to the toilet and someone uses it during that time. If that is the sort of encryption you are after, there are other options which are better suited.

I would suggest:

partition 1 => swap (same size as your ram, if less than 2gb)
partition 2 => main Linux distro (Ubuntu), 20 Gb
partition 3 => /home (this will be kept, if you decide to change your main distro), size => remaining Gb, minus 20Gb
partition 4 => created as an extended partition, 20Gb
partition 5 => 10Gb
partition 6 => 10Gb

Partitions 5 & 6 will allow you to install other distros for evalution purposes, using partition 1 as swap.
Partition 3 can be acessed from either of these distros on a mount point; do not try to use it as the /home for these distros.

Hope this helps, & have fun learning.

Thanks!

I looked but I am nearly 100 G without home folder! :-( (just on the file system folder)

Perhaps I misunderstood your origional posting; I thought you wanted to replace, get rid of, your Windows system & install Ubuntu as your main system. (?)

That is correct!

But at the moment I am running both, And In my Ubuntu file system are nearly 100G without the home folther. So I cannot leave 20G for systems file it will not be enough. But at the same time Ive got your point! :-)