I will not have windows on the machine and I do have 2 hard drives if need to use both. I'm a little confused on the logical / extended partition thingy.

I got that you can have only 4 primary and 64 logical / extended - at least I think I get that.

Well, actually, you can have only 4 partitions on your hard drive. This sounds wierd, but it does make sense, if you know that one (and only one) of those four can be an extended, which can (and has to) be made up of logical. Atually, up to 64 of them. So, at most, you can have 3 Primary partitions, one extended, which is split up into 64 logical. So, to get the most out of your hard drive, you can have 67 partitions on your hard drive.

Ok, now that's all the info i need, except the size (but you can figure out that one for yourself). I'll post what I'll get here for you later today (at least for me it will be).

svinka

Ok, here goes my advice to you.

hda:
hda1: Mandrake partition. As much as you want.
hda2: SWAP. As much as you need.
hda3: /home for all. This is not necessary, but can be useful if you don't want to fill up your distro partition with your files
hda4: Extended.
hda5 ... hdan - as many as you want distros.

Since you have 2 HD's, you might even wanna make /home, /opt, /var or some of them on different partitions on that second HD. BUT, i didn't do that, and don't know if it would work properly if you did...

Since i use only one HD, i can't think up of any roles for a second one. Perhaps make the whole drive a huge /home? Or just make all the distro partitions bigger, and put some distros on the second HD? Dunno, here i might not be able to help you.

Well, it looks a lot like my table, with the exception of no winXp and /home as a Primary. Good luck with trying out distros!

svinka

P.S. Oh, and one last advice. If you format the partitions in Knoppix or some other program, DO NOT format the partitions using the setup tools for each distro. For me, it was a lot of trouble, since i mounted every distro partition at every distro, and it kept checking them, and saying that they're different! So, when you install your second distro, don't format the partition for it using the nice partitioning tools during the setup.