Fairly decent step-by-step for a eeepc 900:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2319615,00.asp

Honestly, I'm not a big fan of non-destruct partitioning. ESPECIALLY for drives this small. If I'm going to go through all the trouble of setting up my OSes from scratch, I can spend the extra 10 to backup my stuff on an external and then reload it. In all honestly, even if you DO try non-d partitioning, you should still backup anyhow...

You can use the recovery DVD to restore the hidden partition should you choose to at a later date. There really isn't a point to "saving" it, since it's all but useless unless booted into the environment.

Seems like a decent resource for you: http://forum.eeeuser.com/
Permalink | Report

To begin with, yes, gparted is great place to start. I personally use http://www.sysresccd.org , as it has a graphical interface and web browser.
As for the partitions themselves, I have an extra one for files and documents to access from both OS's (linux can read and write FAT32, and even NTFS, but MS doesn't do to well with reiser, ext2 or ext3)

As for swap, it depends on your RAM. usually you would double the RAM to determine swap, but when you have more than 1GB, then this is not as necessary, since RAM is faster, and linux isn't as much of a memory hog as Windows. So the swap really shouldn't be more than 2 GB.

I honestly don't know if it's good or not to move that hidden partition, and frankly wouldn't mess with it. If you removed it and burned to dvd, I don't know that it would boot properly. Chances are that if you have that partition, then you do not have a recovery CD for XP. So my advice would be to just keep it. gparted will recognize it, and it should even show up in your boot menu after the linux install.

I would really suggest going to the user forums for whichever distribution you have chosen and search for some of the partitioning info there, as they all will have a different installed size, but 30 GB seems more than sufficient. Also, having even another partition for your home folder is beneficial, so that you can reinstall the OS without having to start from scratch.
Permalink | Report