Fine Details needed for partitioning & mounts in a legacy laptop with WinXP32 on

[gold_finger]

I have a 2009 Fujitsu Esprimo Mobile 250 Gb  and 2 Gb Ram and 3 USB's and a DVD. 
Win XP 32  Sp3 has C drive , sda 1  84Gb  NTFS and D drive 78 Gb  sda 5 which is full of documents mainly,  NTFS and E: drive sda 6 which is 88 Gb and NTFS and which I have emptied of all but less than 1 Gb of stuff in order to put Linux Lite 1.08 on it .

I have 30 Gb  free space in drive C for my XP work.
I have been told to 1. Delete drive E , sda 6 and create 2 logical partitions  ONE of 50Ggb NTFS and the Second Linux /ext4 root partition + Linux Swap space of 1-2 Ggb and to leave about 8-10 Ggb of unallocated space for windows .

How you partition really depends on how you want to use computer.  Don't know why someone told you to make an NTFS partition -- usually you'd do that to have a partition that could be shared for storing data you'll  want access to from both Windows and Linux.  (Windows can't use Linux formatted partitions, but Linux can use Windows formatted ones.)  You stated already that you have what sounds like an NTFS partition for data files (drive D; so I'm not sure that you would need to create another one unless you had something specific in mind for it.

Sounds like you have a second data partition (drive E which you've emptied to make room for Linux.  (As N4RPS said, it that little bit of data left on it is anything you need, copy it off somewhere else before deleting the partition.)  If there is not much room left on the "D: drive" partition, then that may be why someone told you to make another NTFS partition.  However, in that situation, you can just expand the size of the D: drive after the E: drive is deleted and not bother making another partition.  Or, if you really did want another NTFS partition, don't delete E:, just shrink it to make room for Linux.  (No point in deleting it, then recreating it.)

I have no idea why you were told to keep 8-10GB unallocated space for Windows.  Do you?  That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Let us know how you want to use computer.  Do you want all Windows and Linux data separated; or will you want to have access to some or all data files from both OS's?

At this point, if you haven't done anything yet, boot into Windows and take a screenshot of the partitions as shown under disk management section.  Post that screenshot back here for us to see.  Then boot up with the live LL disk and open a terminal window.  Copy/Paste the following commands into a terminal one at a time and hit enter after each:

Code:

sudo fdisk -l

Code:

sudo blkid

The two commands will display information about the current partition structure on your drive.

Highlight/Copy the entire output, then paste it back here for us to see.  When typing your reply, hit the "#" button on forum interface.  It will insert two code blocks -- [ code ] ... [ /code ] -- into your reply area.  Paste the terminal output between the two code blocks.  That makes it easier for us to read.


While waiting for replies back:
*  Create backup copy of important files on any partitions -- good to have just in case you make mistake, power goes out, etc.
*  Make Win XP recovery CD/DVD if you don't already have one.