Chris wrote:
> 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?
> 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?

I would first physically reformat the HD, e.g. with the
appropriate utility on the CD that came with the HD. Then I
would install Windows XP which may make two partitions, a
small one in FAT format (e.g. 50 MB) and a big one in NTFS
format for the rest of the disk. Then I would shrink the
big Windows partition, e.g. to 20 or 30 GB size, and carve
up the freed up 50-60 GB into one swap partition of about
500 MB and into at least half a dozen other partitions of
various sizes, e.g. a 20-40 GB common /home partition, then
the FAT partition you wanted, and a number of / partitions
for the various Linux OS's that you want to install. Plan
with a view toward the future; you may want to install more
than just Debian and SuSE. I'd recommend you set up about
10 partitions; that would include four primary ones of which
one can then be used as a logical partition that can
encompass all the other non-primary partitions.

You can do all of the above with the Linux command fdisk or
preferably with QtParted from the live System Rescue CD-x86,
or possibly with the partition manager of the Debian installer.

After partitioning the disk in such a way, I would then
install Debian in its own / partition (perhaps 3-5 GB in
size), the /home partition and the swap partition, and I
would instruct it to install GRUB in the MBR of the HD.
This GRUB then will handle all the booting into all of the
OS's, i.e. Windows and the various Linux OS's. Each
additional Linux OS I would then install in its own /
partition (of 2-4 GB) and the common /home and swap
partitions and instruct it to install its own boot loader
(GRUB or LILO) either on a floppy or in its / directory BUT
NOT on the MBR. All the new entries in the partition table
will be recognized and handled through the GRUB installed by
Debian.

Coexistence of Windows and multiple Linuxes (or even just
one) on one and the same HD is sometimes problematic. If
you really want to be safe, you'd get yourself another
internal HD (you can probably get a 40 GB HD for $30,
assuming you have space in your system unit) and install
Windows on that HD (hda) and all the Linuxes on the 80 GB
drive (hdb).

I once read a post from someone who I believe had more than
30 different Linux OS's on his system, and he summarized the
experience gained from doing that in a recommendation for a
kind of grand strategy of disk partitioning for multibooting
machines. I thought that paper was useful, and I'll see if
I can dig it up; I have to search for it a little.

You might also come up with useful tips by googling for
"multibooting Linux Windows disk partitioning", or something
like that, in Google/Web or Google/Groups.

Robert