How should I divvy up my hdd partitions?

I'm going to be dual-booting XP and Vista Ultimate on my new R61. But I only have 100gigs to work with, since I decided to go with a 7200 RPM drive. How do you think I should split the space? I like both XP and Vista about equally, so I have no real preference. Is XP easier on the laptop battery? If so I might make that 60g or something.

I'm doing the same thing on my desktop, but with more space on its hdd. On my desktop I do a lot of gaming with XP, so I gave XP the majority of the space (70%). But I won't be gaming as much on the thinkpad.

The facts:
100 gigs total.
Both XP and Vista Ultimate
I like both equally.

Any opinions or advice?

 

You're asking some a good question. I'm a developer and we are somehow rough on system disks. I have always configured my PCs like a mainframe with a system disk and other partitions emulating other disks and it's saved me a number times as recent as yesterday.

I use the system partition for executable code. Anything that I have that is personal goes on the ancillary partitions. This way I can restore backed up system images without disturbing my disks at all. The means my music, writing and developer's code is on those partitions as well as my email store. Needless to say i don't follow the microsoft trends as far as My Documents and My Music is concerned.

I recognize that this will not protect me from a general head crash. Several years ago, I had a thermal sensor sensor detach from a disk and I could not see that it was over heating. I lost the entire disk.

On the other hand, I had severe crashes from Vista SP1 installation yesterday. It was a simple matter to put in a backed up system image and I was back on. Microsoft had a bad patch. Earlier this year, Microsoft send out a patch that deactivated Vista on my 3000 N100. Around christmas my desktop had a memory failure corrupting the diskl. All of these conditions, after replacing the memory were repairable in an hour after recovering using Vista's Complete PC Backup within an hour with all hardware installed.

My T61p has 200 gb of storage. I allocate 100 gb for Vista. Currently 30 gb is in use. Few things are as unpleasant as outgrowing your system disk, so I would be liberal.

 

Renee, thanks for that well thought out reply. I wish I had your kind of disk space to work with! Part of me wants to go 50/50, but then whichever OS I choose to use the most, I'll getting less use with compared to if I allocate to it some 60 or 70 gigs. On the other hand, if I skew it (like say I go 30/70), then I may find out that I prefer using the OS on the smaller partition, which would be incredibly sucky.

This would be much easier if I had a strong opinion for or against one of the OSs. The only deal-breaker I can think of is whether or not XP is significantly easier on the batter life.

 

This is how I partitioned my 200gb disk:

Partition 1 15GB XP+apps
Partition 2 30GB Vista+apps
Partition 3 remainder Data
Partition 4 5GB Rescue and Recovery

Having a separate data partition allows me to reformat and reinstall OS without losing data. I put user profile directories, documents, applications that do not require installation and VMWare virtual machines on my data partition.

If your preload is Vista then RnR would become partition 1, Vista partition 2, XP partition 3, and Data partition 4.

 

I don't think XP is noticeably better and it certainly doesn't have the features that Vista does.

You have to remember that if you use restore points and especially lenovo backups not to mention the registry all of these things will begin to consume disk space some glacially and some catastrophically.

I don't know what your money situation is but a new 200 gb 7200 rpm Hitachi travelstar is less than $200. Does your machine have a sata disk?

 

Seems pretty reasonable. As long as you have the recovery discs, I don't know that you need the R and R parition.