I'm going to be buying a new 100Gb hard drive sometime soon and I've got 2 already. One is my C drive for windows and the other is my D drive which is partitioned for partly windows and the other for Linux. I'm going to be having different partitions on the new hard drive and I would like to install several Linux distros to experiment with. Is it possible to have something bigger than a dualboot like a tri or quadboot? If not then how would I go about solving my little problem here? By the way, the two drives I have now came with the computer. It's fairly new, I got it a little over a month ago.

Sure, you can have 100 boot if you want. Just add an entry in your boot loader (probably LILO if you are using Mandrake) and that's it.

Cool

I am quadruple booting. See my distros.

yes you can dual boot as many os as you want provided that you have the space in your HD or extra HD...

Yes, I quad-boot as well, Windows 98, XP pro, Slackware and Mandrake. Two hard drives, Windows on one, Linux on the other, all booted via the XP bootloader. Nice and straightforward, even for a rampant noob like me, and works very well.

Lim45

can you post your complete specs? just curious....

Now that is what I call cool. This makes me like Linux even more, though I crash it a lot from fooling around with it but wow. I'm getting a 100Gb hard drive for about $100 somewhere in June. Maybe I'll get another one for my birthday cause I live on my computer and I use up space like hell.

This particular question has been very informative for me, have often wondered the same thing now I know it can be done. However, I do have one question about this, if I installed a controller card and tossed in a few more hard drives how would I go about getting them into the boot process.

you can only have a max of four primary partitions on one hd though, in case no one else has mentioned it

Just remember there is a limit to the number of primary partitions you can have (I believe it's 4). Beyond that they will have to be extended partitions.

Opps....someone just said that....sorry...

you can do some of them like this.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...istro-Dev.html

it doesn't waste as much hard drive space, since you
don't have to have plenty of free space on a bunch of
different partitions, just plenty on one.

This is a reply to Dale Dorman's question.

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if I installed a controller card and tossed in a few more hard drives how would I go about getting them into the boot process.

I have a second IDE controller and three disk drives installed. The process of setting up the extra drives is to partition them, format the partitions, copy files, and change /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf (or grub).

The main problem that I had is that most of the secondary IDE controller cards on the market are buggy. The manufacturers correct their problems in the Windows driver for the IDE controler card. The Linux kernel contains specialized drivers to fix buggy hardware but there is about a year time lag between the time that a particular card is released and the release of the corresponding Linux driver. Therefore make sure that the card that you buy is either bug free (advertised that it works on DOS and Linux) or that the Linux kernel supports the chipset on the controller card.

But remember also if you create 4 primary partitions.. that's it, you can't create a logical on the same drive with 4 primary. The 4th would have to be reserved to create the logical partitions. So basically if you want more than 4 partitions, you can only have a max of 3 primary and then the rest logical.

Just thought I'd make that aware to anyone who didn't know already.

Complete specs, eh? Okay, for what it's worth, here goes...

Homebrew machine:
Gigabyte GA-7DXE motherboard
Athlon XP1800 processor
GeForce 2 Graphics card
Soundblaster 4.1 sound card
1x Seagate 40gb HDD
1x Western Digital 40gb HDD
512mb DDR memory (PC2100)
Intel 536ep hardware (supposedly) modem
LG 16x DVD-ROM
Artec 48x writer
LG Flatron 17" monitor

On the first drive, I have 5 gigs for Win98, 10 gigs for XP, and four small logical drives in the remainder for docs, downloads, etc. Slack and Mandrake each have roughly an equal share of the other drive.

Nothing remotely state of the art as you can see, but it's all good Linux-compatible stuff, and very stable.