I was thinking about this for a while and I haven't come across it in any of my reading. Could you split an os over two drives? Example:
drive hda, 35GB xp - 5GB fat32storage / hda1 8GB root - 2GB swap
drive hdb 10GB usr - 10GB home -10GB var / hdb 10GB root linux#2
hdb 1GB swap - 9GB user - 5GB home - 5GB tmp I hope I made this clear enough I'm sure someone must have tried this before. Maybe I got too much time on my hands. TIA

Welcome to LQ!!

In principle, you can mount as many different partitions to the filesystem as you want----it makes no difference whether the partitions are on 2 (or more) different drives.

I think a better way to use 2 drives is to keep all of the OSes on one, and use the other for shared data. I also do not see the need for anything more that / and swap for most Linux installations.

You can put linux on any drive you like. Yes, you can use partitions on more than one drive.

Not sure why you show swap on two drives, though. Windoze uses a swap file, by default on C: you can relocate it to another partition.

Linux can have a separate swap partition, you do not need two, although it won't hurt anything. On an old system I had, I had 2 swaps, one on each disk. In theory it makes the system a little faster. I never could measure any improvement though.

I don't see any value in having a separate usr and home partitions. Others may disagree, to me it just complicates things. I could see that if you were to add a disk on a installed system short of disk space, then add the new disk partition as usr.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Pixellany. I think I follow where u r comin from the only reason I would want to partition the way I showed is that I have a Corporate version of XP on my drive and the friend that installed it for me has moved away so I have no way to reinstall and I would like to keep it Ive saved alot of things on it over the years and it would be a real pain to move them all.