Hi,

I've just built a secondary desktop from old parts. I'd like to use it to try out different distributions for a few months before I actually put it to use. I have two IDE hard drives (10Gb and 40Gb). Since I've never had multiple distros on the same machine, I was wondering how I would go about it. I usually have the following: 32M for /boot, whatever I need for swap (on primary partitions); 30-40% of what is left for root and the rest for /home. Sometimes I also have a /usr or /usr/local partition. Can different distros share swap and /home partitions? I was thinking:

/dev/hda1 swap swap 256Mb [shared]
/dev/hda2 extended
/dev/hda5 / ext3 ca. 10Gb [distro #1]
/dev/hda6 / ext3 ca. 10Gb [distro #2]
/dev/hda7 / ext3 ca. 10Gb [distro #3]
/dev/hda8 / ext3 ca. 10Gb [distro #4]

/dev/hdc1 extended
/dev/hdc5 /home ext3 10Gb [shared]

Would this work? If not, how would you suggest I go about it? I was thinking I would write the bootloaders to the mbr during each installation. BTW, I wanted to try RH/Fedora, Slack, Gentoo and ArchLinux (if that makes a difference).

Any help is appreciated.

Regards,

What I would do is this: create one parition for swap, then create seperate partitions for each distro you want to install. You don't have to pratition the disk like you did since this is going to be temp.

thanks, flakzeus. I just created a swap partition, and five other logical partitions. I guess my main question was whether they can share swap. I'll try it out tonight and tomorrow anyway, and see how it goes.