Creating partitions

Hello I've installed Fedora 15 to try the distro, it was a bit difficult at first (I have used Slackware for the last 8 years) but I'm beginning to become familiar with Fedora usage, although I have a few doubts about the partitions. For years I used to create 2 primary partitions, SWAP and EXT3, but now I found that Fedora requires a different layout with more partitions like other *nix operating systems that distribute the space in more areas for home, root, usr, etc. I would like to keep simple my disk, and reading the Fedora installation guide found that there are only 3 partitions required, SWAP, BOOT (ext3) and ROOT / (ext3)... I still don't like the idea of an independent boot partition but let's do it in the Fedora way... so, I want to know if this layout may work for me... I want to ask before doing it to save hours of installation just to try and see the results... #1 PRIMARY type 0c (Win95 Fat32 LBA) #2 EXTENDED A - SWAP type 82 B - BOOT /boot type 83 (linux ext3) C - ROOT / type 83 (linux ext3) And one additional doubt... Fedora worked fine on this laptop but just bought a new one, it comes with Windows7 preinstalled and want to keep the original system backed up... Do you think it is safe to use Clonezilla for any modern hard disk? My doubt is because I have a relatively old IDE disk (80Gb) that after restoring a Clonezilla backup it does not boot anymore, I guess it is due a possible different geometry interpretation by my installed linux and the Clonezilla bootable linux, since the disk is ok and works always perfect... So, do you think it would be a good idea to backup Win7 on a SATA 500Gb disk, no datafiles yet, just the operating system, I want to keep it for the license... And, after the backup, during the Fedora installation, it asks how to use the hard disk, there is an option to shrink a used partition, but would it work with Win7? As far as I know a NTFS partition can not be shrinked... is it possible? can you comment something about this? Thanks for your help! -- Miguel Cardenas