Advice re setup with usb hard drive

[astrogirl]

Hi I am new to using the raspberry pi. Just tried noobs but now want to setup with berryboot using sd card and a usb hard drive (external powered) to have main OS files (for several operating systems) load on the usb hdd (root).

Just want to know what is best way to have this setup with partitions on usb hdd so that there is one for the os data, one to hold things like video files for use with open elec media center (largest partition) and a partition to backup the os data section and the sd card. ie: 3 ext4 partitions - is this sufficient or should I have partitions set for something else as well? I am also trying a small ntfs/fat partition at front for a media player to use for transferring of recorded video files -as don't think it will read ext3 so if having this is ok to have root ext4 for OS of raspberry pi as 2nd partition as I think media player may only load one partition and the first one. I have changed drive from mbr to gpt as well so all partitions are logical ones using minitools partition wizard.

What about a Linux swap partition? I saw this in minitools pw- if using how large should it be and how to go about making raspberry pi use this partition for it?

I also want to access the hard drive and maybe sd card via my windows main pc via wifi networking -to read and copy/modify files on all partitions and have paragon ext4 driver for mounting the ext4 partitions - hope will work via network? I read ext4 being better for linux system on pi than ntfs. Is there another ext4 reader and writer for windows that is better to use?

How should I order the partitions - eg NTFS then OS root, Data, then backup partition? Does raspberry pi /Linux determine which is active OS partition - can't see any option with gpt to set a partition as primary or active.

Also what sizes would be best -for OS partition (using several OS images) and backup partitions? This is a 250GB drive without wireless connectivity - so hoping attaching it to pi with its wifi dongle may make it a sort of network type device for ipads etc to connect to eg like Seagate Central or a NAS.

Also for purpose of a more stable system running mainly off a hard drive than an sd card. I had trouble with noobs on sd card where tried to install you tube video in the raspbian browser and whole thing crashed -startx failed to load. Maybe due to lack of space as noobs I had did not seem to expand the space for the OS.
I only had raspbian on it at time.

[astrogirl]

Further to my prior post here- as have already set up my partitions via windows on the usb hard drive - if installing a new pi/linux image to the hard drive will berry boot ask for partition first and just install additional image without formatting? If not this would be a good feature to avoid having to add to sd card and then copy the OS. For now I am doing this way so don't overwrite wrong partition or format my hard drive in error.

[ghans]

I have no idea how BerryBoot works , but Windows does not
care which format the drive is in as long as you use
Windows File Sharing (Samba) instead of directly connecting the
drive to the PC. The Pi on the other hand cares , it will
be very slow with NTFS drives / partitions.

Most Linux distros use a file called "fstab" to automatically
assign partitions to mountpoints in the filesystem. You
should read up on that , especially how to use UUIDs so
that your system doesn't break when you shuffle partitions
around.

ghans

[gkreidl]

You cannot run linux root file systems on partitions created with windows (FAT or NTFS).

[astrogirl]

Thanks to above replies - yes I have just worked out how to mount using fstab so think I will do as suggested in my 2nd post rather than install straight to usb as not sure where berryboot will install if does not show partitions and don't want to risk overwriting data partition. Yes I am aware linux uses ext system and not ntfs and that faster to use ext4 so am trying that.