Advices for partitioning scheme in dual boot installation

Ask Fedora
1

Hello,

I want to install a dual boot system (Windows 10 + Fedora 32) on a 256 GB SSD. The machine has got 8GB RAM + UEFI.

I will install Windows 10 first (50 GB for C: (NTFS partition) + 50 GB for D: (NTFS partition)), and then Fedora 32.

For Fedora 32 installation, I will choose :

  • 50 GB ext4 partition for (“/” mount point for System) ;
  • remaining space ext4 partition for (“/home” mount point for User documents) ;
  • 8 GB for swap (same size as RAM) a lot of discussion about this size… ;
  • 1GB (or less ?) for (“/boot/efi” mount point for EFI system).

My questions are about :

  1. EFI partition :
  • As Windows 10 installer will create an EFI partition, do I need the “/boot/efi” partition or can they share the Windows’ one ? (I think Linux needs its own one but I want to be sure) ;
  • What is the recommended size for this EFI partition ? I read about 1 GB or less.
  1. The Primary / Logical partitions :
  • Windows needs a Primary partition. What is your recommendation for Linux ?
  1. Do you think some partition (“/boot” ?) is missing ?

Thank you for you help

2

Hi @franchips,

  1. You should use the EFI partition Windows created. Unless I’m very much mistaken there
    should not be more than one EFI partition on a drive.
  2. If you’re installing Windows with EFI, you’re drive will be using GPT partitioning, not MBR. That means that the distinction between primary and logical partitions no longer holds. If your partitioning tool asks, pick primary.
  3. You don’t need anything else, but it might make future troubleshooting simpler if you stick to Fedora’s default scheme, so I’d add a ~1GB /boot partition.
2 Likes
4

IDK if this is steel the case:
Arch Wiki: Windows’ Fast Startup and hibernation.

5

Don’t know either, but the EFI partition is getting written to extremely rarely, so I doubt it has a significant effect in praxis.

It’s probably a rare occurrence that multiple ESPs cause problems, because the boot entries actually reference the partitions directly, but in the rare case that the system firmware actually uses the presence of an ESP to find boot entries, it will likely go randomly wrong if there’s more than one.