I was joking around with my friend (also a Linux user) about installing Win XP Pro + 5 other distros of Linux on one PC with the standard way I like to set up my distros (swap, /boot, /, /home, /usr). He says that it's impossible and I bet him 10 dollars I could do it. This may seem kind of random but is the following possible or am I out 10 bucks.

01. Primary: Windows XP Professional OS

02. Extended: Swap and Boots
2a. Debian Swap
2b. Fedora Core 3 Swap
2c. Gentoo Swap
2d. Mandrake Swap
2e. Slackware Swap
2f. Debian /boot
2g. Fedora Core 3 /boot
2h. Gentoo /boot
2i. Mandrake /boot
2j. Slackware /boot

03. Extended: OS and Apps
3a. Windows XP Professional NTFS (Program Files folder)
3b. Debian /
3c. Fedora Core 3 /
3d. Gentoo /
3e. Mandrake /
3f. Slackware /
3g. Debian /usr
3h. Fedora Core 3 /usr
3i. Gentoo /usr
3j. Mandrake /usr
3k. Slackware /usr

04. Extended: My Files
4a. Windows XP Professional NTFS (My Documents folder)
4b. Debian /home
4c. Fedora Core 3 /home
4d. Gentoo /home
4e. Mandrake /home
4f. Slackware /home

I have a 120GB harddrive, so I'm planning on making all the complete distributions (and Windows) 20GB each. That means all the swaps are 2GB, /boots are 100MB, /s are 5GB, /usrs are 10GB, and /homes are 3GB. As for Windows, the OS itself will be 5GB, Program Files will be 10GB, and My Documents will be another 5GB.

So, will it work?

It is certainly possible. A bit of advice though, since you can only have one OS booted at any one time you may as well just have one shared swap partition. There also isn't much point in having more than one /boot dir as it is really only used to kick of the boot loader, the other kernels can be on the root of each drive.

Some thing else you may want to consider is having a shared /home partition so that you can access your files in each distro.

Nothing like doing it the hard way! At least you put Windows on first which will save you a big hasstle. I would leave that on primary #1 then make one Extended partition to use up the complete rest of the drive. Then put all other partitions on logical partitions which will be inside the Extended one.
IMHO, you sure don't need all of those /swaps and /boots or even /home and /usr as I would just make one swap for all systems and one / for each system. Then I would have each system use the MBR instead of /boot. When you install each system, pay attention as to what partition the / is on so you can put a proper entry in somebodies grub.conf.
You can do it if you try, I had a mega boot setup once with 76 systems on it.

Wow, I wasn't aware that you could do that (share swaps and /homes and such). What would really be nice would be if I could share one partition "/home" between all my distributions but also Windows could access it. Would that be possible?

Also (I know this really isn't related to the original topic--sorry) which filesystem should I use ext2 or ext3?

Never use ext2 any more, there is no real need. I'd go for ext3 or reiser.

If you want to let windows access your /home parition then I would suggest making it ext3 and only letting windows access it in read only mode. If you want a seperate data partition that all OSs can write to then make it vfat/fat32. Don't use vfat/fat32 for your home directory though as it isn't capable of taking the correct permissions.

If I make a fat32 partition, what should I make the mount point?

You can make the mount point whatever you like. In the past I have used things like /fat or /shared.

Ok thanks for all your help!