Hi all,

I have a PC that has the following disks

Disk 1 - SATA 250GB Master
Disk 2 - IDE 120 GB Master
Disk 3 - IDE 53 GB Slave to Disk 2

I need to install 3 Os's, Windows XP, Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10.

My plan is to have XP and F8 as my main OS's and have a different disk/partion for testing out other distributions which will hold Ubuntu if nothing is being tested. I would also like an area that will be accessible from all three operating systems. This will be the area that i will keep all my files so its important that none of the operating systems formats this area for any reason.

My first thoughts are that i should use the SATA disk to store my files because if they are on a different disk it reduces the chances of accidentally formating or destroyin the data. This means i will use the IDE drives to hold the 3 Operating systems and that F8 will hold most of the applications. Are the other two disks enough for both OS and apps?

The Windows operating system wont hold any more than 30GB worth of files. The Fedora installation will hold most of the applications that i plan to use, e.g. Tomcat, Eclipse, JRE etc. The third partition need only be enough for an operating system as it wont be used for day to day usage.

I know that the best person to decide how to partion the disks is probably me but since im not very experienced with Linux and Disk partitioning i would appreciate your input and ideas as to how you would approach this and come up with an effective solution.

Here is my suggestion
/boot = 100meg
/home = 20 gig
/ = 20gig
/usr = 40gig
swap = 512meg or 1gig would be more than enough if you have say 2gig ram.

Now / could be smaller if you want to create /var say 4gig. Mostly /var is for mail and logs but would not think you would use any where near that much.

Have XP use /dev/sda1 and make /dev/sda2 /boot then more than likely /dev/sda3 will be /usr for the size. The rest will fall into the extended partition as logical partitions starting at /dev/sda5 and greater.

Brian