I have a spare 80GB drive. i would like to install 4 or so distros on it. I currently have Window and RH 9 dual boot on the main drive. So in reality I will be running 5 or so distros and Windows. I install grub on the root of each new distro and chain them.

My question:

I thought I read somewhere about certain Linux partitions that must be on PRIMARY partitions. Is this true? As far as I know there can be only 4 PRIMARY partitions.

If it is possible to have 4 or 5 distros on the 80GB drive, how would you partition it? I would like to keep it simple, as I plan to use this drive to try new distros and I will be removing and reinstalling often. I'm OK with not having separate partitions for /home. 1 per distro is fine for my purposes.

Thanks

I've had partitions of Linux install no problem on Logical Paritions (not Primary Partitions) although, I don't know about certain distros being picky, you might wanna check on the specific distros website.

It seems to me that having the distros share the same partition would actually be bad, as config files from one, would differ from the other, which could cause problems (although, it might make things easier, making you only have to do something once). But, since you won't be running the distros at the same time, they can all share a swap partition, which will probably save you some space.