Hi all,

I have a quad boot Windows 7/ Mac OSX SL/ Backtrack/ Ubuntu working fine. I had to create a FAT partition to have my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles shared between the 4 OS.

So, it works, but I would like to know if my partitionning is good.

My hdd looks like this :

- sda1 : Ntfs Windows 7 (primary)
- sda2 : Hfs+ Snow Leopard (primary)
- sda3 : Ntfs Data (primary)
- sda4 : Extended
- sda5 : Fat32 Profiles Firefox & Thunderbird
- sda6 : Linux Swap
- sda7 : Reseirfs BT
- sda8 : Ext4 Ubuntu


I would like to know if it wouldn't be preferable to do that (2 primary for Win and MacOsX and 2 extended : 1 for Data and profiles and 1 for Linux) as follow :

- sda1 : Ntfs Win (primary)
- sda2 : Hfs+ Mac OsX (primary)
- sda3 : Extended
- sda4 : Ntfs Data
- sda5 : Fat32 Profiles firefox & thunderbird
- sda6 : Extended
- sda7 : Linux Swap
- sda8 : Reseirfs BT
- sda9 : Ext4 Ubuntu


However, even if it's working pretty good, putting my profiles on a FAT partition is certainly not a good thing regarding performances I know it is possible to make Snow Leopard writting on Ntfs partition (wich would avoid me to create a fat partition) but I still don't know if it's a good thing (have read so many contradictory articles, posts etc..) ?


Thank you for your help.

You're fine with your current partitioning scheme, don't worry about profiles being stored on fat32, if you're that obsessed about read speeds of your thunderbird/firefox profiles then you should just config them individually on each OS. The only thing you could do better would be GUID partition table (no need for primary/extended partitions) but win7 will not boot on these unless you have UEFI :/ (it even wont work if you DO have UEFI and your board doesnt support efi boot mode)

Hi apocolipse269,

Thank you for reply (didn't see someone replied here).

Unfortunately, I can't set Guid partition table, so I will keep my partitioning scheme as it is.

It works just fine and read speed of my mozilla profiles are acceptable.

Thx.

no problem, keep in mind that the whole "cant boot extended partition" is only somewhat true. So long as your primary bootloader (chameleon/grub/bcd w/e you have set to default boot) is on a primary, everything else can technically be on an extended partition and get chainloaded

I have Partitions
1. DELLUTILITY Fat32 Primary
2. WindowsXP NTFS Primary
3. Snow HFS+ Primary Active + Chameleon 2 RC4
4. Extended
4a. Leopard HFS+
4b. All FAT32

I can boot Leopard from Extended partition.