I need some advice on how to add a distro to my hard disk. Mandrake is using 25gb of 80gb. 1 primary and 1 extended with 2 logicals. I cant add any more extended or logical partitions as it is but possibly need to extend the extended to include the whole disk, but I'm not sure. I've had a look at fdisk, cfdisk, and parted. I'd like to add slackware and possibly another distro but as I said I'm not sure how to set up the partitions. Mandrake 10.1 is set up to use root, swap and home. I also looked at harddrake but couldn't unmount the partitions.

It was while trying to add slackware that I found I was unable to add an extended partition, only primary. Any advice appreciated, thanks.

I don't think it can be easily done.
Why not install slackware on a second primary partition (and the other on a third)?

- Peder

I could install a distro with just 1 partition?

Am I right in thinking you can only have one extended partition on any disk? So it should use the whole disk if possible?

yes," /home" can reside on the same partition as" /".
The swap partition you are using for Mandrake can be used for the other two Linux systems you want to install.

Read this page, it will answer all your questions on partition structures:
http://www.centos.org/docs/4/html/rh...artitions.html

AFAIK yes. You can have four primary or three primary and one extended partition on each disk.

And as Lakota said: if you share the swap partition between the distros you can install them
to one partition only. Just make sure you don't format the existing MDK partitions during install.

- Peder