Fitting Win7 and Mint into 60GB?

fwor

Just bought - but have yet to receive - a new laptop/netbook (11.6" screen so it's sort of halfway between the two).

I want to replace its conventional 320GB hard drive with a 60GB or 64GB SSD, and have it dual-boot the pre-installed Windows 7 Home Premium (32 bit) and Linux Mint 12, but I've heard that Win7 is a bit heavy on disk space use, even with no further applications installed.

Any views on whether I'm going to hit disk space problems if I allow 30GB for each OS? I'm only likely to be installing any number of apps under Linux, and don't intend to use Win7 for anything unless I have to.

Also, is there likely to be a problem taking an image of Win7 from a conventional HDD, shrinking it and putting it onto an SSD? I have this nagging doubt that the fact that the disk geometry for an SSD is different may give problems...

debitcardmayhem

One thing that may be relevant, does Mint have Trim support?

GunJack

Just done a clean install of W7 Pro on this lappy, all updates except IE9 but including .NET 4 and all it's updates, security suite and a couple of other utilities, and it's taken 19 GB. So why not keep 35-40 GB for 7 and associated progs, and the rest for Linux (which shouldn't be so big) ??

fwor

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

One thing that may be relevant, does Mint have Trim support?

Good question. I'm fairly certain it does, and that it's turned on by default, but I need to check that.

debitcardmayhem

Found this http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to-enable-trim/19480#19480

fwor

GunJack wrote: »

Just done a clean install of W7 Pro on this lappy, all updates except IE9 but including .NET 4 and all it's updates, security suite and a couple of other utilities, and it's taken 19 GB. So why not keep 35-40 GB for 7 and associated progs, and the rest for Linux (which shouldn't be so big) ??

Great - that's what I needed to know. Home Premium should not be any larger.

I'm thinking the same - a relatively recent Mint 12 install on another laptop here only takes a little under 4GB, so 40GB for Windows and 20GB for Mint makes sense. Mint will be able to write to the Windows partition anyway, so it's not as though that space is completely unavailable.

fwor

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Found this http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to-enable-trim/19480#19480

Thanks! Just realised that I did a clean install on this PC a while back and forgot to enable TRIM on the small SSD that holds the system files!

Wonder if I'll notice any difference when I reboot? Probably not, as it's not very full...

ChiefGrasscutter

Does this thread on my ISP's forums help in anyway on imaging and then recovering to SSD's
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,101021.0.html

fwor

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

Does this thread on my ISP's forums help in anyway on imaging and then recovering to SSD's
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,101021.0.html

Looks both encouraging and worrying! The laptop won't come with Win7 installation media, so if mine needs a repair install, I'll be stuck. Oh well, if worst comes to the worst I'll ditch Win7 - but it's annoying to have to pay for it and then not be able to use it...

I still haven't settled on which make/model of SSD to get. Most of the 60/64 GB ones seem to get terrible reviews if you look around (for example the reviews on newegg.com).

The ones that are fast get bad reviews, and the ones that get good reviews tend to be slow...

debitcardmayhem

fwor wrote: »

Looks both encouraging and worrying! The laptop won't come with Win7 installation media, so if mine needs a repair install, I'll be stuck. Oh well, if worst comes to the worst I'll ditch Win7 - but it's annoying to have to pay for it and then not be able to use it...

I still haven't settled on which make/model of SSD to get. Most of the 60/64 GB ones seem to get terrible reviews if you look around (for example the reviews on newegg.com).

The ones that are fast get bad reviews, and the ones that get good reviews tend to be slow...

Yes,yes,yes,yes....No . 1 Create a recovery/rescue ISO using the W7 backup s/w and the use the same for a disk image. I haven't read that article yet, but most things are possible (even getting through to Gunjack ) and Xboot is your friend, I used similar when I had a [STRIKE]brain[/STRIKE]thunderstorm which messed with my netbook (which didn't have a CD drive)

Toxteth_OGrady

fwor wrote: »

Great - that's what I needed to know. Home Premium should not be any larger.

I'm thinking the same - a relatively recent Mint 12 install on another laptop here only takes a little under 4GB, so 40GB for Windows and 20GB for Mint makes sense. Mint will be able to write to the Windows partition anyway, so it's not as though that space is completely unavailable.

Easy fit. My 64 gig SSD has a 40 gig C: which only uses 16 gig for Win 7. I use the other 20 gig as an SSD cache for my 1 TB data disk.

If you set up folders on a storage disk for docs, music, pictures etc you can point your Win 7 libraries to those instead of the default Windows user folders.