Two distros on same partitions?
 

Currently my HD is set up as follows:
hda1 - ntfs (winxp) about 76gb
hda 2 -extended
-hda6 /boot ext3 102mb
-hda7 / ext3 19gb
-hda8 swap 1gb
-hda 5 vfat (transferin stuff from winxp to linux, extra storage) 20gb

can i use the same linux partitions for more than one distro? currently i have fedora core 1 installed on it

edit: thinking about trying mandrake, and dont want to end up with a ton of partitions

hi, i could be wrong on this - but i dont see how multiple distro's can be setup with the same partition structure. they will all have different system scripts, and how will they figure out which one to use to just boot up after mounting root?

also, you DO know that you can trasnfer files between ntfs and fat without having to keep 20Gb just for that. ntfs and fat support are already there (modprobe ntfs, modprobe vfat) is all that's needed.

yea, the 20gb was ntfs before i got into linux, i used that as a shared network disk, then i converted it to vfat before i found out that there are ntfs drivers for linux now, but at least with it being vfat i can write to it from linux

If the number of partitions is an issue, all you need is one more Linux partition - you can share swap and boot and even home if you want. (Probably even /tmp but I'm not sure there.) Even aside from all that - if it was for, say, a commercial server, partitioning would be an issue - but to just try another distro, a plain / and a shared swap would be fine.

alright, thanks digiot.... hopefully i can slice a few gigs off the winxp partition, dont use that much space on that partition... hopefully mandrake wont have any problems recognizing the swap is already there?

It shouldn't. Most distros don't have any problem with it. If it does, it's no problem to add it to /etc/fstab later. And you should have no problem with the NTFS drive - I installed Mandrake briefly once and it resized my NTFS with no trouble. I let it do the auto-install thing instead of my usual more manual thing, so it created it's own swap but it was easy to point it to the other later and I'm sure if I'd done a more manual install it would have found the old one in the first place or I could have told it where to look.