I am quiet knew and wanted to try a multiboot system to try everything possible

I have 1 hd with 800gb with WIndows XP Pro, PcBSD and Solaris and this is working fine.

The second Hd of 1TB I partitioned with 3 primairy as I already found you can only have 4 primairy partitions, the 4th partition is an extended partition with 56 logical partitions

I managed to install Dragonfly BSD on the second primairy partition, NetBSD and MirOS crash (they just stop somewhere and keep hanging) every other linux I tried ... well the installer keeps hanging always when it reaches 50%, Freespire just ends itself saying it does not find any valid hd to install
I prepared the logical partitions for linux

Does anyone knows if linux is able to handle 1TB hd or this many partitions

It is quiet frustrating, to be sure it did nothing wrong I installed xp pro a second time on this hd and without any problem (lol) but linux gives a problem

Thanks for helping me out

peter

Why not check your hardware compatibility with a live distribution? The size of the hard drive should not be a matter.
There are lot of live distributions like Ubuntu, Dream Linux, Knoppix and others too.

Thanks, but my hardware is not the problem (Amd64 x2 / nvidia 7800 gt) already had Kubuntu before. Also every live cd works fine.

The problem is the installer when I select the second hd of 1Tb where everything ends, it is a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 (32MB), I doubt there are compability issues with this hd

I discovered the error, for some reason the linux kernel treats SATA as SCSI and is only able to handle 15 of them, in this case 15 partitions.

This means that you are only able to install linux on 15 partitions, as some of the linux installers require 2, / and /boot, you already lost 1 possible operating system as f.ex Ubuntu and all deratives of it are able to install itself within 1 partition. Some mention the 15 partition limit in their error, the others their installer just crash.

I am focussing on graphical linux distros with installers although I have installed a few without such, and about 6 distros are to buggy to handle my amd64 and the installation crashes.

These are the ones which have to be installed first in order to avoid error messages concerning more than 15 partitions
Zenwalk
Freespire
Centos
Foresight
Opensuse
rPath
Sabayon

Most other distros apparently have altered their kernel and do not have a problem installing after the 15th partition

I also want to warn about PClinuxOS, it has a graphical installer and calls itself Radically Simple but it is the greatest piece of crap between all linux distros I have encountered so far and the fastest way to destroy you other partitions including your Windows partition, be warned when using this distro in a multiboot, also the installer is very buggy.

Also when installing Freespire you do not have the option to install the bootloader into the partition, you only have the option to install it or not and if you install it you have a high risk of wrecking all a number of other installed distros with the same grub version as it eats for some reason their bootloaders, I consider it crap too for this reason

Hmmmm....something new to learn here at LQ everyday. Thanks for the information. Surely will help others.