Feedback, please, on how you partitioned

Good morning!
Today I'm requesting from all of you fine people some information regarding how you partitioned (I hate spelling "partition") your laptop HDD's for Linux.
I was able to get my new Acer 5920 set up for Linux, but it wasn't pretty and I'm not sure what exactly happened along the way. The laptop came with four primary partitions (thanks Acer) which means destructive formatting just to make room for a Linux partition.
I suspect most new lappies come with similar stoopid partitioning schemes and would like to hear how you got around it.
I'm interested in dual-boot or virtualization stories. If you just wiped the drive and installed Linux that's too easy

 

My DELL came with four primary partitions, too.
I deleted one partition (it carried Media Direct, a bootable environment for media playing), shrinked Vista overbloated partition (non without effort, you'll find posts in this forum explaining why) and created a big extended partition into which installing as many Linuxes I wanted, and creating my data partitions.

As for linux, you should create
One logical partition for every linux you want
One swap partition
(optional) one or more partition for linux data.

I'd suggest for your principal distro to make
partition for /
partition for /var
partition for /home

and one or more data partitions (your documents, your media)
If you plan to dual boot windows I'd add a FAT32 partition for safe data exchange (1 GB would be enough).

Be advised, though, that the latest kernel treat your hard disk as a scsi device and put an arbritrary limit to the number of partition you could have. That is 15 partitions including the windows, recovery, swap and extended partition 'enclosure'.

 

On my own PC, I upgraded to an 80GB drive which meant a new format / partition anyway. So, I have 40GB NTFS (for XP), 5GB FAT32 (to share files between Windows and Ubuntu before the latter was able to write NTFS reliably), 2GB swap, and the rest EXT3 for Ubuntu.

My wife's PC is a new Acer, which came with 3 partitions: a little one with system restore stuff in it, and then two more roughly 40GB each, one of which holds XP (but in FAT32 for some reason), and the other was also FAT32 but empty. So I just reformatted the empty partition as EXT3 and put Ubuntu on that.

If you're feeling brave, I'd suggest getting an external USB drive, booting from a Linux 'live CD' and downloading Partimage and Gparted. Back up the system restore and Windows partitions just in case - they should compress down to just a few GB - and then you're free to repartition the drive however you like.

 

Attaching a screenshot of original disc layout for comparison. 4 primary partitions. I think that was a conscious decision on Acer's part to discourage tweaking.

Also, a guide for taking screenshots from a GParted LiveCD here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=325775

I wrote that up a year ago so GParted might look a little different but should be very similar steps. I am not a Linux guru by any means so if I did it you can too.

Saving screenshots much easier if you're using a Linux LiveCD like Ubuntu or Kubuntu, but partitioning is more reliable with a GParted LiveCD so that's why I posted those instructions.

It can be very educational to take screenshots at every step for review later and/or help someone else out.

 

I have a 150gig ntfs for Vista and 100 gigs for Ubuntu with 45gigs to /, 55 gigs to /home and 2gigs to /swap. My / partition is reiserfs, /home is ext3. My VirtualBox XP 'virtual disk' is a dynamically expanding (up to 30gigs) file residing on my /home by default. I also have a 'mapped' 500 gig external HD on my Ubuntu desktop where I store large video files and back up stuff.