Windows 7: Size of partition for Win 7

BarrieNoodles · 26 Aug 2010

I will be installing Win 7 on second drive in it's own partition (Dual Booting with Vista on C:\), what size should the Win 7 partition be? I have 1TB to work with, so size is no problem.

Lemur · 26 Aug 2010

Here's Microsoft's recommendations. Of course nobody in their right mind would make their OS partition this small.
Windows 7 system requirements - Microsoft Windows

Tepid · 26 Aug 2010

This really depends on how much software/games/temp space/and other stuff you plan on putting on the c: drive. Typically, I would not go with less than 200G.

eldinv · 26 Aug 2010

Quote: Originally Posted by BarrieNoodles

I will be installing Win 7 on second drive in it's own partition (Dual Booting with Vista on C:\), what size should the Win 7 partition be? I have 1TB to work with, so size is no problem.

This depends if you plan on installing lots of apps and games, your most basic apps and maybe one or two games, 60-80Gb should be fine, if you make a separate data partition.

Tutorial here:
Data Partition

Night Hawk · 26 Aug 2010

Another thought is how much do you need as far as general use as well as comtemplating a second storage.backup partition or simply having one large primary to work with.

Here the situation was solved by having additional drives for storage and backup purposes. Here's a look at how things were while running the RCs on the last build a year ago right before 7's release date.

Bare Foot Kid · 27 Aug 2010

Hello BarrieNoodles, welcome to Seven Forums!

The one thing to keep in mind is that the Windows built-in partition tool will only let 3 primary partitions be created, and a fourth extended partition that as many logical partitions as you have drive remaining letters, per HDD; so keep this in mind as you set up the partition structure.

I wouldn't put an OS on less than about a 100GB, JMMHO.

Night Hawk · 27 Aug 2010

A good look at the 100mb system reserved partition Bare Foot Kid is referring to is seen in the snipping from the Disk Management tool here. When installing 7 on a prepartitioned drive however using a 3rd party program you generally won't see it.