Absolute Smallest Partition Needed for OS?

[sburtchin]

I want to setup a multiboot with Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP and others. I plan multiple instances for most so I can test new apps before committing them to my permanent installations. The "Program Files" will be kept on a separate partition to be shared by the multiple instances of each os. All os's to be independent of eachother on their own partitions --- and no separate root/system partitions. I'll be using GRUB. Pagefiles also on another shared partition.

What are the absolute smallest partition sizes for the following os's assuming that I keep as little as possible on the root/system partition? What can I offload for each (like temp files, "My Documents", internet favorites, etc.)

Win95: Not many apps here.

Win98: Mostly apps that won't run on Win2000.

WinNT: Not many apps.

Win2000: My main os for now. Email, Office, CAD, and a lot of other apps.

Win2000 Advanced Server: Very few apps. Mostly just for admin practice.

WinXP MCE: Probably just for media apps as I'll be trying to get away from Microsoft as much as possible.

I read that I should keep 50 MB of the pagefile on the root/system partition in case there is a problem accessing the pagefile partition during startup. Is this a good idea?

When I get the Windows updates I get a bunch of folders with names like "$NtUninstallKB914389$". These quickly eat up hundreds of megabytes. Someone told me I could delete these. I did and everything seems to still work OK. Is there any reason why I would ever need these folders?

What about APM? Do I need a partition to store this information? Is hibernation just for laptops?

[Sylvander]

"Is this a good idea?"
I believe so. Can't remember why, but I previously had my swap-file on D: and moved it back because of some such problem.

"Is there any reason why I would ever need these folders?"
Only if you ever needed to uninstall them, and that's unlikely.
I deleted mine; besides which I have image backups to restore the system as it was before the installation of such as these.

"Is hibernation just for laptops?"
Definitely not! I love it. :D :cool:
Much quicker and easier to hibernate & resume than shut down and reboot.

See below the image of my 5 GB C: partition by "Disk Frontier".
Greatest usage [Win2000Pro folder] is at the top.
Looks like 2 GB would be the usage with no programs or swap-file.

[sburtchin]

Is the size of the hibernation file easily pridictable? Should I dedicate a partition for this, or just send it to any data partition? If the data partition would not have enough free space, does this create a problem?

Getting back to my main question, what are the absolute minimum partition sizes needed by these operating systems assuming that I move everything that I can to other partitions? What would you move? Not move?

Maybe I've assumed too much, but can the pagefiles and swapfiles for all these operating systems share the same partition, or does Microsoft get confused if a pagefile/swapfile is left over from another windows version?

[Paul Komski]

A good "minimum" size for operating systems always contains some slack, since in no time at all they will expand with log files, TIF and index.dat files and so on. I would take a stab at a reasonable minimum and after successful installations you can always resize the partition downwards with BiNG or similar if space is critical. You could try 100MB for Win3.x, 300MB for Win95/NT, 600MB for Win98, 1GB for Win2KSP4 or similar and 2-3GB for WinXP for starters. If the installations need more they should prompt you during the installation.

PageFiles and SwapFiles can certainly share the same partition - and even use the same file for VM usage.

Unless you have multiple hard drives you are going to run out of primary partitions if you want to install multiple instances of the DOS-based Windows unless you use a boot manager such as BiNG configured to utilise multiple primaries, which I prefer not to do since the PartitionTables are no longer standard so that if you fdisk /mbr you will lose access to partitions. It is also possible to convert standalone primary partitions to logicals and boot to them with boot managers but this is advanced stuff and requires tweaking of boot sectors with disk editors.

Put the older OSes at the start of the drive to minimize crossing bootability thresholds and note that the older OSes also do not allow multiple visible primary partitions to co-exist.

Use GRUB if you must but I would personally leave Linux out of the mix for the sort of multibooting you are contemplating and use a decent 3rdParty boot manager such as BiNG or XOSL and then ensure that you install GRUB/LILO to the root partition and not to the MBR.