On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:30:38 +0100, Chris <nospam@[127.0.0.1]> wrote
in alt.os.linux.debian:

> Successfully installing Sarge has made me unwarrantedly confident about
> experimenting - particularly with the support of people in this
> newsgroup.
>
> Luckily I have a spare machine, which has an 80GB drive.
> I'm wondering about putting several OSs on it like this:
>
> Partition 1 XP
> Partition 2 Vista
> Partition 3 FAT32 writeable by all OSs for data
> Partition 4 Debian Sarge
> Partition 5 SUSE 10.0
> Partition 6 Linux Swap
>
> Does that sound sensible?

it certainly sounds possible.

I would suggest putting the swap partition near the middle of the disk
to gain a slight speed advantage. You could also consider creating a
/home partition to be shared by Debian and SuSE for convenience.

> And how would the multi-booting best be done?
> BootMagic on the MBR?
>
> Or would the successive installs simply add items to a GRUB on the MBR?

Grub reads either /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.conf in order
to list the available kernels. Debian updates this automatically when
a new kernel is installed, but in my experience doesn't handle the
update quite as I'd like it to. My solution is to update the Grub
configuration manually after each kernel upgrade. This isn't
particularly difficult. I keep all my Linux kernels (currently Debian,
Gentoo and Slackware) in a single /boot partition, but this may not be
necessary.

I know nothing about BootMagic. Grub has worked perfectly well for me
when multibooting assorted Linuxes, BSDs and Windows versions.

PJR :-)
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