I'm curious. If you had about a huge hard drive like over a terabyte, how many os's could you fit on it?

Does grub or lilo have a limit? Could you have 10 OS's on your computer?

20? 30? Is there a limit? Because that would be funny to have 20 OS's on your comp.

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showt...hreadid=143973 has someone with 100+ OSes on one pc. I'm sure I recall someone saying that limit is 256, but I may be misremembering.

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147959
145 still from saikee
He's also on LQ, I'm sure he would be happy to tell you his experiments

1TB ... That's a good start !

There is no real limit. A OS is more a kernel, possibly with basic programs and libraries. In this since, as long as you can boot the kernel, and the kernel can work with the hard drive configuration, then you can have as many as that. Im sure OS's like DOS, and possibly Windows, dont support extended partitions, and so will require to be placed in a primary partition. If that is true, then you could only have 3, no more then 4, of such OS's installed on the same drive. If there is support for extended/logical partitions, then its really a matter of how many can the hardware and OS support that becomes the limit. I dont know if there is a hardware limit on extended/logical partitions, but there is probably a software limit, such as the size of a byte (256), or maybe even a integer (32,000+).

In any case, its possible to have lots of OS's installed. If your really wanting to get lots of them running, and be usable, then youll have to set things up so that the OS's have some partitions they all share, for data and user files. In *nix systems, you might even be able to share the whole /home directory across all of them, as they all essentially use similar programs, if not the same, and support similar if not the same config files.

I think i heard someone got 16 OS's/distributions installed on a single hard drive. But really, once you start talking about this many OS's, and most of them are probably just Linux distributions, you should really just use virtualization technology unless you actually have good reason for all the OS's to be bootable by the BIOS/bootloader. edit: yes, hardware virtualization so there is no performance impact. Also, Linux can also switch kernels in runtime, which basically blurs the line of virtualization when talking about installing so many OS's, as any hardware limitation could be overcome by booting into one distro, changing the hardware configuration (like swapping whole partitions), then switching off to another distro.

I believe the limit with a traditional partitioning scheme (3 primaries, 1 extended, and the rest logicals) is 63 partitions per drive on up to four drives. I use a boot manager called bootitng which only works with primary partitions, the vendor's website will say you can create over 200 primaries with support for 8 drives. The actual MPT (master partition table) it has can have a maximum of 255 entries/partitions on up to 8 drives or one big one like yours.
But such a massive multi-boot becomes a novelty really quick, because other than a learning experience, you will have no need for that many, especialy Linux as they all use the same kernel and basic tools/software.