Partitioning adjustment and installation of Linux

[Colonel_Suave]

Hello all,

In the fall of 2015 I purchased a new SSD to replace the HDD that was in my Satellite A665-S6050 since I have plenty (1TB) of external storage space. The SSD I purchased is 250 GB, at the time I installed it through the guidance of an online support chat through BestBuy or circuit city or something.

I now want to install Linux OS on my comp in addition to the Windows 10 that is currently on it. I use Linux for a lot of work at school, and I'm no longer able to complete my assignments and projects in the bioinformatics lab at school. So, it would be very convenient for me to use Linux from my laptop as it is necessary for me to complete almost all of my assignments.

Keep in mind, I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to things like this. My skill set includes: Fixing hardware and mechanical things, biology, math, reading, and Battlefield. So, naturally I have doubts that I partitioned things correctly, or at least optimally, when I originally switched to the SSD.

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I'm attaching a screen shot of what my partitioning is currently. Right now, I have Windows 10 on the SSD and some documents, pictures. My external HDD has mostly everything that is on my SSD (as a backup), plus some non-essential things like music, movies, games, and pictures. What should it look like?

When I decided to do this, I had a few questions pop up in my head--

(1) - Will I need to back up everything on my SSD to my HDD during the repartitoning and will repartitioning require me to format my SSD?

(2) - In general, should I have anything on my SSD besides Linux and Windows?

 

[carnageX]

What is the 50GB partition at the beginning, and what is the 10GB partition at the end? Did you make those? Are you planning on putting Linux on the 50gig partition and the Swap on the 10gig?

1. No you won't have to reformat when creating / resizing partitions.
2. That's up to you.

What distro are you going with? Are you going to be using GRUB or the Windows bootloader?

 

[Colonel_Suave]

Sorry for the very late reply, end of the semester and this forum slipped my mind.


I was a bit ambiguous with question 2. I meant to ask, in your opinion, should I have anything other than OSs on my SSD? I have people telling me all the time that I should just be running an OS on an SSD and plug my data from the 500GB HDD.

As far as what the different partitions are, I couldn't tell you. Some guy from an circuit city support or something told me what do when I was partitioning; so I actually have no idea what anything is on that page.

Would it be worthwhile to format/repartition just to know in the future, or can I check what each one is from my end somehow?



What is an appropriate partition size for an OS?

If bootloader is what it sounds like then that. The way it is set up in my university computer is I choose the OS when the computer is booting up.