How should i setup my PC partition?

I want to clear out my PC and setup the partitions.

Right now i have it as XP, Win-7, Vista, XP/Test/Spare

I notice my PC is pretty good at virtualization, at least virtualizing linux. I also rarely boot out of my primary XP although i do find myself deving on windows 7 once in a while. So i figure i can have it as XP, Windows 7, data partition then... what? i still have one more slot.

There may be a more useful way to do this so what do you guys think? My bro has 2gb partition that is used to restore the OS which can be ran during the bootup process. However i dont think i can do that with mine. So, what are you thoughts?

Solution 1:

Depending on what you do with your machine, you might consider only installing a single primary OS and then use a virtual machine (VMware, virtualbox, VirtualPC, etc.) to host any other OSes. Note that Windows 7 is supposed to have an embedded version of VirtualPC for running a full virtual XP installation. If you take this approach, then you can just have a single partition for your primary OS and data, then allocate space in the VM application as needed for the other OSes. If you need to share data with the VMs, you can create a shared folder in your primary OS, then mount that as a "network" drive in the VMs. An advantage of this approach is that you can do things like use Windows 7 as the primary OS and use NTFS and any other fancy Windows-only features, yet still be able to access the data from a guest Linux OS by mounting it as a samba share.

If you need better hardware access from several OSes, then it might make sense to install them as you suggest. joshhunt and John T's suggestions are good for that approach.