Is it possible for me to use 2 distros on one single partition? I'm reinstalling gentoo and wanna put it on the same partition as fc8. Is it possible? I'm doing this so i can use a separate swap partition. Right now i have 2 windows partitions and one for fc8. Since there's a limit of 4 partitions per disk, i thoguht it'd be best to have my gentoo and fc8 on the same partition, if possible.

Thanks.

There's only a limit of 4 "primary" partitions. You can split the 4th primary partition into lots of logical partitions (though I think the current kernel limits it to 16 partitions per drive on a SATA disk).

And it would be a certified disaster to put Gentoo and FC8 on the same partition, unless one of them was a virtual machine file.

Maybe if they were installed into separate directories, and then some way mounted chroot'ed so that either one would appear to be on it's "own" root? Ok, that doesn't sound good, but would be interesting to try if I didn't have anything else to do

But yeah, the limit is only for primary partitions. Somebody else knows better than me why exactly primary partitions still exist, but I don't find a sane reason..Windows might get a hiccup if you tried to install it onto a logical partition, but Linux isn't so pecky, it runs just as well on a logical partition than on a primary partition. So if you have two partitions for Windows and one for Fedora, that leaves one extra (your swap?) where you can add several logical partitions - enough for your Gentoo and swap. Of course you can create a partition layout as you wish, but that way you wouldn't have to do much changes except for telling Fedora where the new swap partition is; if you decide to make some other partition the logical one, you need to deal with moving operating systems. A swap partition is more easily created, moved and so on..