Hi, I am creating a multi-boot laptop with multiple operating systems, and I dont know the best way to partition the disk. I am running windows 7 64 bit right now, and plan to have windows 7, inferno, possibly Ubunto, freeBSD, and maybe others. I have created a recovery disk for windows, and do not have any personal files on this computer, so saving them is not a big issue. Hopee you guys can help, thanks!

First, shrink your Windows partition through Windows disk management. How much you shrink it depends on how large the drive is, and how many other OSs you want to add. I run Windows 7 happily on 30GB. Windows disk management will only shrink the partition to just above half the size of the original partition because it does not move the backup MFT (master file table) which is in the middle of the partition. Bootitng can shrink it past the half way mark and move the backup MFT accordingly. It is the only partition manager that claims to be able to resize FAT and NTFS partitions non-distructively. There are many horror stories about regarding the use of open-source partition managers resizing NTFS, none of which will claim the same, I suspect it has something to do with moving the backup MFT.
Then, read this article for ideas.

EDIT: BTW, I run Linux happily on 10GB, I go with small partitions for performance reasons. Plus, I make a large NTFS partition at the slow end of the hard drive (the back, or "allocated high using bootitng"), all personal data is stored in this partition instead of the partitions holding operating systems. This way the data is easy to access from Mac OSX, Windows and Linux, which in turn keeps them fast because they are on small partitions at the front of the drive, and they are easy to backup without the load associated with large amounts of data. The swap partition can also go to the back as most computers nowadays have lots of RAM memory and the swap does not get used.

Just to add it to the answer provided by Brains, You can create just 1 /swap and 1 /home partitions and share it between all your linux distros without any problems. So you just need to create a separate / (root) partition for each of your linux distro.

I am trying to do the same thing with an old (3-4 years) Toshiba Satellite (AMD 2X 64). There are three partitions for NTFS (main, boot, and backup partition; Vista OS). I had about 120GB for linux partition. But I can have only one another main partition (in the linux partition, I was told that I cannot have more than 4 partition (I think that means the four main partitions) for linux (da4). So I have to sub-divide da4 to three sub-partitions (da5, da6, da7 all under da4). After I installed LMDE at da5 (it worked fine), then I installed openSUSE 11.4 at da6. But after reboot, I only see openSUSE there in the boot list. Somehow Linux Mint disappeared.

Is this means that I have to totally re-partition windows part to make it in one partition, so I can have some (three) partitions left for my multiple linux distros?

Thank Brains and Sandy to point out how to use one partition for /home to get user data in one place.

-ymw

No.
In the article I posted labeled "read this article for ideas" should show how to partition a disk with many secondary partitions within one extended partition. In your case you have the Windows stuff on 3 primary partitions, the fourth one was made into an extended partition by the Mint installer with three secondaries, one for /, one for swap and probably one for /home. If you wanted to add more distributions, you could probably have done some custom partitioning during Mint installation at the partitioning stage to make more than 3 secondary partitions within the extended partition, then you could have specified which ones would be /swap, /home and Mint / partitions leaving others empty for future use such as installing other Linux, BSD etc.
By installing OpenSuse in one of the only three secondaries created by automatic partitioning in Mint, you have overwritten either Mint /, /home/ or /swap. It is possible Linux Mint is still there and was not configured in OpenSuse boot menu, possibly because it is broke if the /home directory is gone which can be where you installed OpenSuse.

You can download and burn to CD "gparted" and other open source partition managers and create your partition scheme before installing Linux by creating up to 60 secondaries. Then you would select custom partitioning during the Linux installation and specify which partitions to use, others would just be empty and unused till you install another using same method by selecting custom partitioning again. When you let the Linux installer take care of the partitioning, it does not know of your intentions to add more Linux distributions later, it is designed to do things in the most common way, which is to only have one operating system, which is why it will use all free space or the whole drive if you tell it to and only make the partitions it is designed to make for that one installation.

There may be problems associated with using one /home partitions for many Linux, the secret to making this work is to use a different user name in every Linux. If you use the same user name, personal settings and user specific system settings (which are in the user's /home directory) from one Linux with a different version of desktop environment can render that user in another distribution unable to log in as settings have been altered and will not work with the other installation.
Which is why the best alternative I have come to use is to keep /home within /, not in it's own partition, just keep data in a universal filesystem data partition which all operating systems can read and write to, making it easier to backup the data which is in one place, and personal settings in /home do not get tampered with, and you spend less time at LQ looking for ways to fix the problems associated with using one /home for all Linux.

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Thanks, Brians, I am reading your article now. It is very helpful. Now, I
am testing linux distros to decide one for my new laptop. This way, I can compare
them side by side easily.