installing several OSes
 

I am looking to format my computer, and install several OSes, such as windows 7, then distros like Ubuntu, Debian, etc. I have a 500 gb hard drive, and was thinking of setting aside 100 GB for 4 linux distros. I have had an issue with not giving enough space to other OSes besides windows, that they don't even have enough room to even update. Any recommendations/advice on how to go about doing this? I currently have the following setup as in the attached image, so as you could imagine, it's a little bit messy, and I would like to fix this. Unfortunately, it is set up so that I don't have much room to mess with anything, and will need to reformat the drive.

According to the image, Windows is using 460 of those 500GB. If the other partitions were removed, the remaining space would be enough for two systems, but without much space for personal files. Although I do not know if your Windows system needs any of those extra partitions. If you want to keep Windows, I would suggest giving it less disc space. Does it really need 460GB?

I have a lot of software and files that have accumulated over time. I think I am long over-due for a format.

Or simply a clean-up. Remove the accumulated flotsam and jetsam and only leave the files you want to keep. Then shrink the Windows partition to a "reasonable" size. Although, partitioning the drive and re-installing Windows followed by Linux systems may be easier. I am guessing, since I do not have Windows installed.

If you give a Linux system about 5-20 GB that would usually do the trick, depending on what exactly you're going to install. Now you may want about 1-8 GB for /home and of course, more for your personal files. You may still have your music collection or stuff like that on your Windows partition and mount that partition in your Linux systems aswell, but i'd recommend a "data/work" partition to be shared between all Linux systems.

For example:

15 GB Linux1
4 GB home1
15 GB Linux2
4 GB home2
62 GB Linux: work/data/store
-------
100 GB

If you don't want to do much except to have a feel of the distros, I donn't think any distro will need more than 10gb, max 15gb.

For this you need to create partitions on your own. Create one 1/2GB swap partition. Divide the remaining 100GB in to three.
Install one Linux in each partition. creating a small swap space is key.

Until I upgrated to a 750GB hard drive, I installed 4 distros (Slack,Mint,Fuduntu and Fedora) on a 80GB hard drive.

So you want to have Windows 7, up to 4 Linux distributions and have no problem with re-partitioning the disk?
Then I would go this way:
- Remove all partitions and create a 100GB partition, install Windows into it.
- Create an extended partition using the rest of the space.
- Inside that partition create a logical swap partition, the size depends on if you want to use hibernate, if so make it at least as large as your physical RAM, otherwise 1GB should be more than enough.
- Now create 4 logical partitions for your Linux installations, all 20-25GB in size, so that you have enough room even for larger installations or working with large files.
- Create one logical partition using the rest of the space of the extended partition for sharing data between the OSes, best filesystem here would be NTFS, so that you can access it using Windows without having size-limits like with FAT32.
- Now you can go on and install the Linux distros you want.

I downloaded Lubuntu 12.10 desktop i386 and Mint 14 xfce DVD 32bit, unzipped them both. Can not install either OS in two old computers. computer 1# is a Pentium 4 2.8 GB speed with intel dual memory motherboard, loads windows XP easily. Mint 14 in My Computer double click icon to demo installation, restart computer to display mint 14 demonstration, restarts XP instead. Mint 14 DVD won't install on the other computer with Pentium 4 running Fedora core 4 2.6 Linux Kernel OS purchased from Newsagent. Lubuntu 12.10 wont install either, rebooting in existing OS. every attempt to google search non installation problem gets me first page how to install using USB port. no usb port bias options exist. tried twice to doanload Linux products both not working. Boot. folders Lubuntu 593bytes Mint 681bytes.

You don't have to unzip the ISO files, you have to burn them to a CD/DVD (as image, not as data CD) and then boot from them.