I've been using Linux for a while and had been trying to get more than 2 Linux Distro's in One Hard disk. I've only succesfully installed Win Xp, Fedora Core 3, and Mandrake in one hard disk but I am not able to install more than that.

Here's my setup:
Laptop with 1 80GB hard drive
1 primary partition for WinXP (10GB)
1 primary Partition for Fedora Core 3 (10 GB)
1 logical Partition ( almost 60GB) containing 1 Partition for mandrake 10.1 (10GB)
1 primary partition for HP's Quick Play (204MB)

Frommy experience, the primary partition containing Fedora creates a swap drive of about 1Gb. THe same goes for Mandrake in the logical partition. My question is I'm not sure on how I should go about installing a 3rd, 4th, and 5th or more distro in the logical partition as the distro setups would want to wipe off Mandrake's swap drive in the logical partition. I'm stuck! I don't know how to go about. I've googled and I had found how to install 2 linux distro in a hard disk.

FYI, I'd like to install linspire, xandros, and try out a few more other flavours on my computer.

How should I go about it? What do you guys recommend I do? What should be the best configuration to get multiple *nixes work harmoniously with one another in a single hard disk?

1 swap partition - each distro should find and use it OK.

1 partition per distro

1 partition for the home dir. Make sure each distro has a different user name.

From personal experience, install each distro and choose the option to put the bootloader on the root of each distro / partition.

Debian and Ubuntu + Ubuntu derivatives will find and add each distro to the bootloader, whereas other distro's may not do this.

So far, my record is Suse 9.3, Fedora 4, Mandrake 10.1, Slackware and Ubuntu all on the same hard drive.

It didn't take me long to realise this is actually not the best way to go. You end up spending loads of time learning a little bit about lots of distros instead of learning lots about just one.

In the long run it's far better is to pick one distro and stick with it.

That said, I think most people go through a "how many distros can I get on one harddrive?" stage.

I have also gone through this stage of multibooting and I can tell you that it is a good thing. It's the only way to know if a particular distro is better for you than the one you currently use. Having said that, a few thoughts about how to do it:

1. You NEED to read this article in distrowatch: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20040614 It will tell you everything you need to know (almost).

2. I have asked (and been asked) about having just one /home partition for multiple distros and the answer I get (and give) is that it's generally not a good idea. Better to have one partition per distro, and a common partition to share files back and forth. If you have windows on your system, you should make the common partition a fat32 partition, so you can share there, too. Do all your partitioning with QTparted from a knoppix live cd.

3. You need to make sure whatever *nix you want to install doesn't require a primary partition. Windows requires a primary partition. So does Solaris. All LINUX distros that I know of will be okay with an extended partitions. See the link above for more on this.

4. You mention Linspire. I installed it and found that its installer was so user-friendly that it wouldn't let me select what partition to install it on (OK for a noob on a single-distro box). I seem to recall it had a funny way of numbering partitions (not the typical /dev/sdax way) You might have better luck. I didn't care for Linspire at all.

5. If you really want to get a good flavor of linux, go with an rpm-based distro (Suse, Fedora, Mandriva), a deb-based distro (Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu), Slackware, and Gentoo. What you will find is that most rpm-based distros are very similar, deb-based ones are similar, and then Slackware and Gentoo are each on another level. Xandros is pretty easy to install and I think is deb-based.

6. You'll want to install Windows first and then pick a "primary" distro, which is one that will have it's bootloader writtent to the mbr. I like lilo, some people use Grub. Use whichever you find easier. Lilo is used in the distrowatch article.

other than that just have fun. post back if you run into problems.

I also install multiple distros in my PC, but the distros always set the choice:

swap partition: none / linux1 / existing

which linux1 is a linux partition available in the drive.

I usually use "existing", so that my distros use only one swap partition. It is kind of convenient

Btw few of the distros I found providing this option are SimplyMEPIS, Slackware 10.1, Mandrake 10.0 (not exactly, but it allows you to continue without setting up a swap partition). Just try it.

Cheers.