Hi,

I have a generic built sytem with two internal hard drives. A 20GB and a 200GB. On the 20GB I have installed Win XP. On the 200GB I was going to partition in thirds and install a diff. distro of Linux perhaps (fed/suse/ubuntu) just for fun/experimentation with linux and to learn linux. Now my question is this. The whole reason I am doing this is so that if windows messes up from spyware/whatever or if I screw up linux cuz of my exprimentation, I could easyily reinstall without having to affect the other os'es. Can I make a quadra-boot system is it do able? meaning when my system comes up GRUB would ask which do you wanna boot

1. WIN xp (alone on the 20GB drive)
2. FEdora (sharing the 200GB drive)
3. Suse (sharing the 200GB drive)
4. Ubuntu (sharing the 200GB drive)

Also, how would I go about making it so that only one boot loader screen is launching any OS in the menu for example if in the above menu I choose choice two I don't want fedora to show me a second bootloader screen (like an annoying cascade of boot loader screens).

any pointers very appreciated. i love to experiment. but that often means backing stuff up. which i hate to do. this is why i am configuring my system as such.

STFW for starters. There are several tutorials on this topic at LQ as well as countless existing threads.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...GUI_Multimedia

I'd have to say the writing in most of them leaves a great deal to be desired, but my own writing style is far too verbose, convoluted, extemporaneous, and rambling for most people's taste - so who am I to criticize? What was I saying?

I'm assuming XP is already installed, so it's probably too late to do anything about that. Given its size, I'm not sure shoehorning it into 20GB would have been my choice. But the 20GB would have been good for /boot /home /swap partitions - which could be shared by all the Linux distros - leaving sufficient room to sextuple or octuple boot if you really wanted to. My only advice is to think very carefully about your partitioning scheme.

Grub should have no difficulty handling this without presenting "cascading boot loader screens". Tutorials on grub are also available at the above link.