Ok, I am back at the watering trough and fishing for recommendations from the Guru's. Last weekend, after an interesting SATA install with XP Pro (which I got thru ok)...I have 5 IDE drives, 3 internal, 2 USB external, total of 6 hard disks (including SATA1)...I know, you must think I am crazy...but what the hey, I might as well use them...

I am booting off of SATA1, which when I installed XP, I only had SATA1 powered and an IDE DVD as slave on Secondary IDE port. XP did a hiccup and then I loaded the SATA drivers on a floppy and everything went hunky dory. After getting XP up and running, I then gave power to the IDE hard disks, and VOILA! Magico~! I have 6 total drives, inluding the two USB externals.

I want to boot off the SATA1 with GRUB, XP Pro installed there and create Ext3 partitions for Fedora and maybe try out Open SuSE and Ubuntu... my goal is to set up a multi-boot system with:

XP Pro
Fedora Core6
OpenSuSE 10.2 or latest
Ubuntu, latest version

I have PLENTY of hard disk space (1.3 Terabytes total) and 6 hard disks. I want to load FC6 first and then add on OpenSuSE and Ubuntu.

Alright, so now you know what I am up to.

I am asking everyone on the forum to give me some thought. What recommendations for hard disk setups for the various Linux Distro's would you consider crucial? How would you go about doing it? I want to hear some suggestions about partitioning, where to put the different distros, why...and especially about GRUB and how I would set it up to have multiple distro's.

I want to make sure I AVOID the "Grub won't load" thing. I have read some recommendations that say don't write to the MBR of the Sata, some people have tried to put GRUB on a hard disk other than the primary boot disk (in this case, the SATA drive).

Some recommend putting the boot onto the primary...

So I am just a little confused here...and wanting to be clear about what I should do. I think I have been clear about what I want to do, now I am asking all of you for your advice.

Thanks again - jimmyCfivertwo

im not all that experienced with dual boot, but i do kno that you gotta put win XP in first on you primary HD first, (the IDE one) and then you can install Linux on the same one, but you select the option to "resize drive and use the free space" or something to that effect, i did this one last night and it works GREAT!!!




hope this was helpful
-Oby