Partitioning Mania

My laptop's power cord got broken (for what, the 5th time over the past half year?) so I turned it off and proceeded to play with the laptop's innards. Removed the transplanted combo drive, opened the two underside doors, played around with the HDD, the 802.11g chip and, most importantly, the 2 mismatched SO-DIMMs.

Then dad fixed the power cord. Put everything back together and proceeded to boot Linux Mint. Mint didn't start. Tried Windows 7 but it BSOD'd. Did a hard drive and RAM diagnostic and nothing came of it. Most of the BSOD's I've had over my lifetime have mainly dealt with the RAM or the GPU: as the Compaq didn't have a discrete GPU, I went for the RAM.

512MB of Generic DDR2(400) in slot 1 and 1GB of Kingston DDR2(600) in slot 2 = didn't work.
Kingston in slot 1 and Generic in slot 2 = didn't work either.

So I tried just using 1 SO-DIMM - it works! Then I introduced the other DIMM and it's back to normal. Except that Mint works and 7 refuses to.

And that's the story of why I'm planning right now to purge my hard drive and start from the beginning.

And it doesn't sound so ridiculous or insane, too:

* I don't have much personal data left. What I have left I can cram (with ALZIP's assistance) into my three flash drives totalling 21GB.
* I've accumulated a lot of OS install disks (8 distinct OSes) and I want to have something more than a simple Mint-Windows setup. (Why I've accumulated them is another blog entry.)
* Both my Linux and Windows partitions/installs are pretty messed up already.

What I plan to do:

I have an 74.5GB (small, right?) Hitachi 5400RPM SATA drive and I shall divide them up into the following (in logical order, from the beginning of the HD to the end):

• 30GB (in NTFS) as my general internal data repository
• 14.9GB (NTFS) for the Windows 7 Ultimate x64 install (my current 7 RC install uses ~10GB for System + Basic 3rd party stuff like VLC, iTunes and Chrome)
• 100MB (NTFS) as the System Reserved partition mandated by Windows 7
• 500MB for a GNU/Linux Swap Partition (Linux barely uses swap unlike Windows. I'll go against the "same or twice the size of RAM" advice.)
  
• 6GB (ext4) for Linux Mint 7 x86's root.
• 2GB [(Open)BFS] for Haiku (woohoo!)
• 500MB (ext3) for Damn Small Linux or any other minimalist Linux Distro in the future.
  
• 6GB (depends, maybe ext4, Reiser4 or XFS) I'm thinking of putting OpenSUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu Studio.
• The rest I'll use for a future install.
  

I will not be putting Mac OS X at the moment as both OSx86 SL and Snow Leopard itself are both lacking maturity. I'll wait for a comprehensive distro that will hopefully include drivers that weren't present when I was using Leopard (those would be the external audio, built-in WiFi and enhanced touchpad drivers.)