I appologize if this should have been placed elsewhere. I'm new to these forums. I'm going to go over what I have done so far and then I'll ask my questions.

Here's the deal: My buddy lent me his Dell Inspiron PP9L, one he doesn't use anymore, so I can tinker with it and learn something. My goal is to partition the hard drive so it can house Windows, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty, Debian 4.0 Etchy and Gentoo 2006.1. Also, I want to set it up so that all Linux distros AND Windows can access a single /home directory. I was told to use ext3 and that I can acquire an ext3 driver for Windows.

I'm not a complete noob, I've been reading up on this stuff for a while now. I understand what a primary, extended and logical partition is. What I don't understand exactly is how more than one distro can be set up in seperate logical patitions under one extended partition, share a /home or atleast be able to access a shared directory, and where the linux-swap would need to be located.

I started partitioning with g-parted, but didn't get too far. I couldn't figure out how to set up logical partitions. This is how I partitioned:

hda1/Windows/20Gb(I'd left this alone since XP is already installed)
hda2/ext/10Gb(I want to make this the extended partition to house the different distros and I marked this "boot" but not sure if I should have)
hda3/ext/25Gb(I wanted to make this my /home directory but I'm not sure how to designate a seperate partition so)
hda4/linux-swap/1Gb

I'm thinking I would be able to place all the distros, the linux-swap and the /home directory all in seperate logical partitions under one extended partition. If anyone can confirm this, that would be great.

NOTE: My current problem is related to using G-Parted. I can't seem to figure out how to make logical partitions. If anyone is familiar with this tool and could help me out with a couple steps, I would really appreciate it.

I hope I didn't leave anything out. Thanks guys~

your key should be lvm, assuming that these distro's support it, which i'd like to think they do, but debian zealots may have deliberately kept themselves in the past. i'd suggest you did this...

hda1 windows
hda2 /boot
hda3 extended
hda5 /home
hda6 lvm

you want the /boot seperate for simplicity of booting etc.. and /home seperate if you want windows access (check totalcommander i think, but as an idea, i think it's a bad one... if you don't go with it, integrate it into lvm.) and lvm where you can chop up the LVM PV into as many flexible movable resizeable partitions.

I would just wing it and see what it does, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to make a logical with Gparted. If you look above, you'll see that I have no unalloted space. I want to create some logical partitions in hda2, which I've assigned as an ext3. Do I need to change this partition from ext3 to something else in order to make it an extended partition. I've been looking everywhere for answers to my problem and I can't seem to get them anywhere. The last person I talked to said that I can't make logical partitions without LVM and that Gparted doesn't support LVM.

OMG I'm a fricking noob! When I created the partition, I created it as a primary partition. It needed to be an extended partition, not a primary.

Now, what I want to figure out is if I can access a /home partition using Windows. I was told by one friend that I can acquire an ext3 driver for Windows. However, another person told me that I will only be able to READ using this process. He told me I should create a seperate primary partition using FAT32.

I want to be able to read AND write to a single /home partition using Linux distros AND Windows. Would a seperate FAT32 partition be the proper way to doing this?

fat32 would be the conventional way. i'm also lead to believe that ntfs write support under lnux is working well now though, so you could potentially just write directly to your windows docs and settings even.

No, I'm not going to do a Fat32 patition. After studying my options, that seems kind of pointless. I've found this driver which will allow me to read AND write to an ext3(it's designed for ext2 but ext3 is compatible since it only includes journaling).

So I've partitioned my hard drive this way:

hda1/ntfs/20GB
hda2/extended/15GB
hda5/ext3/6GB(for Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty)
hda6/ext3/5GB(for Gentoo 2006.1)
hda7/ext3/4GB(for Debian 4.0 Etchy)
hda3/ext3/20GB(a directory to store and share)
hda4/linux-swap/1GB

I've installed Ubuntu on hda5, but for some reason, the installer is recognizing all my partitions as scuzzy(sda). Now, I need to write a file somewhere so I can access hda3 without having to use root.

I started installing Gentoo and WHEW! I need some learning to do. But that's why I wanted to try Gentoo and Debian, so I could learn from the differences. As most Linuxians know, Ubuntu does most of the dirty work for the user.

well not a great setup really. as above, a shared /boot would be logical and your other partitions for distros are too small. i assume you didn't look into lvm either?

I didn't realize you could share a /boot between different distros. If you can, I'm not sure how you would set that up when you install each distro. I'm still green to the Linux file structure and how it works. Every /boot file structure is the same between different distros?

As far as my distro partitions being to small:

UBUNTU minimum is 3gb, i partitioned 6gb, leaving 3gb
GENTOO min=1.5gb, part=5gb, left=3.5gb
DEBIAN min=0.5gb, part=4gb, left=3.5gb

I'm not planning on going crazy on installing packages. Also, I think I'll be using Gentoo and Debian more than Ubuntu. Of course, I realize that's just a rough estimate. The extra space will probably be a little less. You really think that ammount is still too small? I've already installed Ubuntu, but I didn't install any extra packages.

I'm going to read up on LVM. I've just been trying to wrap my head around everything. This is all new to me. Keep in mind also, I'm not doing this in expectations for a permanent setup. I'm doing thi to learn. So, I'll probably try a few different ideas.

Thanks for helping me out. I really appreciate it.

a /boot partition is really not part of a distribution at all. all it's used for is to pull boot loader and kernel data from. once that's done and a particular kernel has started to boot, that's it... nothign ever goes near it again. you'd only have one bootloader right? so it makes sense to have a single /boot partition behind it with the files it references.

Hi,

Just to clear that up, I think that Ubuntu defaults to using scsi drivers to manage ide drives. I don't know if that's a performance gain, or what, but just to let you know that nothing is broken .

Now that I think about it, a separate /boot partition is a really good idea. That way grub can find everything it needs in one partition.

Just make sure that grub's config file doesn't point to the symbolic links for the kernels and initrds; instead have it point to the files themselves. Each distro will probably rewrite the symbolic links to point to their own kernel and intird (maybe?). I've never installed two linux distros at once, so I don't know.

Also make sure that the /boot partition is large enough to accommodate three kernels and three initrd files. Don't wanna run out of space there!

Sam

You'll need plenty of space for Gentoo. I've got both KDE and Gnome and already it's taking up about 10GB! And don't forget you'll need extra space to compile; if won't compile, I would say that you really don't need Gentoo at all: it would be just like Debian . As for Debian itself, out-of-the-box, with a graphical desktop, it takes up about 2.5GB but that is pretty minimal and you'll need at least 2GB more for temporary files and saving packages. The same goes for Ubuntu.

In fact, if you'd like to install Debian, I see little point in getting Ubuntu as well. They are just too similar. For educational purposes, it would make more sense to install an RPM based distro: Fedora, Suse or Mandriva to mention just a few.