Multi Boot Win 7 - Ubuntu - Other

[gr33nman]

I am creating a custom build:
* Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz
* Intel X25-M 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive
* HITACHI Deskstar 2TB SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
* XRadeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB 128-bit Video Card
* 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
* Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3 mother board

I'll be using win 7 most of the time, but I want to be able to boot into Ubuntu for video editing. I'd also like to be ready for when Sandybridge is supported by the hackintosh community.

That said, I'd like to use the 80GB SSD as my windows boot drive and possibly to boot into Ubuntu. What are some good strategies for dividing up the 80GB SSD and the 2TB Drive so I can use them to their best advantage?

I also have a Win2k Virtual Machine that I will probably be using from the 2TB drive for backwards compatibility.

Is there any special software I'll need?

 

[WyomingKnott]

Maybe two cents' worth, certainly not more than that:

For the SSD, it depends heavily on how much software you are going to install. My Win7 installation is very comfortable in its 40 GB partition, with plenty (~15GB) of free space. The strategy I would try is to allocate the space based on 40 - 40. You can always adjust it in the future and then restore image dumps (community, is that correct for Linux? I know that it is for Windows).

For the 2 TB drive, if both of your OSes fit on the SSD, you could put all your data in one huge partition and share it between Windows and Ubuntu. No reason that they can't read the same files. If you have one set of data for Windows and another for Ubuntu, having separate partitions would make your backups easier.

The most critical issue is one that I am not qualified to address: what to do for a boot manager. I have a quad-boot system myself, but all the OSes are Microsoft: DOS - XP - another XP - Win7. (Yes, DOS.) So the Win7 boot manager works for all of them.

In your case, I'm reasonably sure that if you install Windows 7 after Ubuntu, you will, at least temporarily, lose your ability to boot Ubuntu. Community, is the Ubuntu boot manager aware of existing Windows installations?

If not, no big deal, but you will have to bone up on boot managers and pick one. There are quite a few excellent freeware ones available, but I'm not the person to refer to.

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I know about Windows versions, but not Linux. Someone else help us here: Does Ubuntu, or any of the Linux distros, handle the TRIM command? gr33nman, if the OS does not pass the TRIM command to the SSD, SSD performance degrades.