partition management in dual-boot laptop / limited space

[Ian Malone]

It's been a while since I touched LVM, I don't use it on my personal
machines since I don't need what it provides and when it was first
introduced in Fedora I found it slowed things down a bit.

Right now I'm changing my laptop to a 250GB SSD (from the 100GB it had
previously). It dual boots and was a little tight for space (since
just getting Win7 installed means about 40GB for the partition).
What's there now is approximately:
- windows c:\ 40GB NTFS
- linux ~30GB ext4, / and /home
- swap 2GB
- /boot 500MB
- shared NTFS remainder (~30GB, no, those don't quite match 100GB total)
* normally on dual boot I put shared data on NTFS, FAT has too many
problems (like file size, naming issues), and I don't really trust
windows not to mess up ext4. There does seem to be a bit of a
performance hit using NTFS from Linux, my desktop has various extra
partitions for different things.

I'm thinking of adding most of the extra space to the shared
partition, but also considering whether it's worth having a separate
/home partition now there's a bit of space for it. But not certain in
advance what the balance of those should be, so it'd be nice to be
able to adjust it after the fact if needed, and I'm wondering what the
most painless way of doing that will be. The nuclear option of course
is take copies of everything, recreate those two partitions and then
copy back on. Is there any less drastic approach?

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk