Ok, say I had this big hardrive, maybe 80 gig. and I wanted to partition it equaly into 10gig partitions. Ok, so, you can only have four primary partitions, like this:

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ok, can I make seconday partions so that I could have 8 distros on one drive?

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assume that swap has nothing to do with this. (it's on the windows drive)

thanks

titanium_geek

Surely you can have as many partitions as you want...? although I could be wrong.

If it's Windows/DOS saying you are limited, well they won't see the partitions once you've installed Linux.

True you can have only 4 primary partitions.
What you mean by a secondary is actually called a logical partition. A logical parititon resides in an extended parititon which is nothing more then a container. An extended paritition is a primary paritition with an extended filesystem type.

I have read you can have up to 64 logical partitions. Never tried this. They are labled hda5, hda6 ...

linux doesn't care where it is located primary or logical. linux can have more then one partition depending on what you want to do and do not have to be same size.

You could have:
hda1 /boot - primary
hda2 extended - container for logicals
hda5 /
hda6 /home
hda7 /var
hda8 /usr

OS 2 would start had hda9 etc...

I usually have around 12 disk partitions and I run around ten different OS images on my system. I haven't experimented past that point, but it scales to that level just fine with no observable performance issues or reliability problems.

Your suggested disk organization is a good one. I do something different because I do a lot of distro testing. I usually have one common swap partition and several different root partitions. This does leave the systems at some level of risk, if yoiu're concerned about the best possible data integrity and security, but for my purposes, it enables me to test out a lot of software and keep several different systems around a while for comparison purposes.