What's a good size for a bootcamp partition?

[Eric1285]

Hello all,

I recently bought a MacBook Pro 2.16 C2D. After getting it up and running I put bootcamp on it, and also installed Parallels to access the bootcamp partition. I initially thought I would like to have three partitions, one for OS X, one for XP, and one for media and files. However, I realize now that OS X is so much better at handling media than XP, and that I would rather have my OS X partition store everything, and just run Windows for certain applications that I need (Visual Studio for my programming class mainly, perhaps a game or two, but that's about it). Right now, I've got two partitions...OS X has about 30 GB, and the XP partition has about 90 GB (haven't made the third partition yet).

I was wondering what a good partition size for XP would be, if I really just need it for a few applications. I'd rather not waste disk space, so I'm trying to keep it down as low as possible. I'll really only be installing Visual Studio right now, as it's the only Windows program I need. Down the line there may be one or two other programs I want to run in Windows, but I can't think of anything right now. Would a 15 GB partition be sufficient?

Also, is there a way to repartition my drives without reinstalling OS X? I've finally got my Mac working the way I want (still a lot of tweaking to be done, but I'd rather not go through what I've already done).

 

[rogersmj]

I've got Boot Camp with XP (which I mostly access through Parallels) setup on both my iMac and MacBook. On the MacBook, for example, I have a 12GB partition for XP that has Office 2003 (including Visio) and Visual Studio 2005 (with just the essentials) installed (a couple other programs too but nothing big). That software currently leaves me with just over 6GB free.

On my iMac (which has a 250GB drive), XP has a 30GB partition which is currently 10GB full having Office 2003 (including Visio), Visual Studio 2005 (full install)...and maybe 500MB of other odds and ends. Really, Visual Studio can be your biggest consumer of disk space. The default install takes gigs and gigs of space (as evidenced by my two installs), but if you strip out a lot of the specialized crap that you usually don't need (mobile deployment platforms, SQL server, and tons of other stuff), it becomes quite manageable.

I would say for your needs you don't need a partition any bigger than 20GB, at the most. That would allow you room for a few games too.

 

[Eric1285]

Cool, thanks for the info. I think I'm gonna go ahead and try it tomorrow with 15GB for my XP partition and the rest for OS X. Hopefully after I install Visual Studio, I'll have about 8 GB free, which should be plenty for a large swap file and a few other applications and files.

 

[bob marley]

Is boot camp free for tiger users? I forgot.

 

[SkyBell]

Is boot camp free for tiger users? I forgot.

Yes, Boot Camp is free.

 

[phungy]

I only dedicated 20.5GB to XP. It's small since I only use Microsoft Office/Web browsing/school work. No games, music, pictures, videos, etc. All that is on the OSX drive/External backup.

 

[cherfizzle]

mann i accidently set it to only like 16 gigs thinking could resize it later (WHICH YOU CANT GOD DAMNIT)
and its working out terrible. i havent used it all but i feel limited.

 

[Eric1285]

So I finally got around to reinstalling OS X. Gonna run Bootcamp in a few minutes, and I think I'm going to go with an 11GB Windows partition, leaving my mac partition at a nice round 100GB. I don't think I'm going to install office for Windows, since I can just install Office 2004 on the Mac. Only thing I'm worried about is maybe the Mac version of office doesn't work exactly like the Windows version. Hopefully Excel has close to full functionality, as that's the only real program I do complicated stuff on. Without Office on the Windows partition, 11GB should be plenty for a full XP Pro install and a full Visual Studio 2005 install. Don't think I'll be installing anything else, but if I do I hope I'll have like 3-4 GB free for a page file and anything I do install. I'll let you guys know how much space I have left after I get everything running.

 

[rogersmj]

I'll just chime in here again about that idea...for me, Office 2004 is so slow and annoying that I prefer to use Office 2003 on Windows through Parallels than use Office 2004 directly in OS X (I hate the lag caused by Rosetta emulation). But if you don't have/want Parallels, then I think what you've got planned out there is a fine option. And remember you can go ahead and remove significant portions of VS2005...a great deal of it isn't used by most people.