Preparing for triple-boot - Getting the Partitions Ready

First things first - before I started my perfect triple-boot installation, I need to have my partitions ready... and preparing partitions for a triple-boot system is not all that easy.

Make sure you understand some limitations of partitions:

• a hard disk can handle max 3 primary partitions.
• a hard disk can have one extended partition with many logical drives.
• Fat32 disk can have up to 30GB of space in Windows and the files may not be bigger than 4GIG each.
  

So after many hours of trial and error I came up with the perfect partitions layout for my system (on my 120GB drive):

1. Primary Partition for my Windows XP install (20GB)
2. Primary Partition for my Mac OSX install (20GB)
3. Primary Partition for my Ubuntu install (15GB)
4. Extended Partition with 3 logical drives:

• SWAP partition for linux (4 GB ~ 2*times my RAM)
• FAT32 partition for exchanging files between all systems (29GB)
• NTFS partition for documents and larger files for my Windows system (27GB)

Total of 120 GB has been partitioned like this.

Now, how did I do this?

I simply went ahead and prepared the partitions using Windows XP "Disk Management" section in the "Computer Management" application in the "Administrative Tools in Control Panel. I created each partition and formatted all of them to Fat32 except for the NTFS partitions which I formatted to... NTFS of course.

This is how the partitions looked like after they were ready for install:



Tomorrow I'll start installing the Windows XP system, Mac OSX and Ubuntu Linux.