Here is my short story - dilemma:
I have an older PIII 933/256 RAM box with a 30 GB drive in it. I have dual-booted before but wanted to try multibooting. I searched here extensively, and found these links to be the closest to an answer (
here and
here).
I was originally going to just do Win2K at 10 GB, Solaris (and maybe FreeBSD later) on ~10 GB, and one Linux on ~8 GB, with a shared FAT32 partition for all at 750 MB. I partitioned using cfdisk (I know, fdisk is better but I needed to see what I was doing better), and went to install Windows first. It went fine into my first partition (but tagged it as bootable, of course) and this is my partition table now:
Code:
hda1 Primary NTFS 10503.69 MB
hda2 Primary Linux 8003 MB
hda3 Primary Linux 10001.95 MB
hda5 Logical Linux Swap 518.20 MB
hda6 Logical W95 FAT32 748.51 MB
---- Logical free space 822.53 MB
(NOTE: I didn't see a UFS or Solaris partition type, so I was stuck there, but hda3 was supposed to be for Solaris)
However, now I am wondering what I was planning on using that extra 822 MB leftover for. I obviously didn't write it all out prior to partitioning, just kinda went with it. But all is not lost, I can repartition the rest without screwing up my Windows install, and it is the crappiest part.
Questions:
1) Do I need to repartition to create a Solaris partition type, and if so, what label do I use?
2) Can I put two Linuxes on here and have them share the swap still? I read that you can only have four partitions (primary) per drive, so could I change my size allocation and do something like a fourth Primary Linux partition and do maybe 8 GB for Solaris or BSD, then two 5 GB ones for Debian and Slack, with the same existing swap?
3) Any other advice or flaws that you see here so far?