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[tonyappuk]

I have a quick question for the Linux experts. Previously when I've installed different Linix distros it's been to spare space on different physical drives. This has happened purely by chance and according to where space was available at the time and each distro has had its own main partition and a smaller swap partition. I have just obtained another 160 Gb drive and I intend to install a few different distros on it to try as alternatives my Mint and Debian ones. I was concerned originally that if I partitioned the new drive with too many partitions it would confuse XP if I went beyond drive Z (!) but then I realised windows wouldn't see the Linux partitions. Panic over. Before I realised this and thinking I had to reduce the number of partitions I wondered if several distros can use the same swap partition? I think I have read that this is possible but the option has never been available to me until now. It would certainly save lots of partitioning activity with my new drive which although not hard may confuse my remaining brain cells!
Tony

[roseway]

Yes, you only need one swap partition on the disk. All the installed distros can share it. If you're going to have multiple partitions, remember that you can only have 4 primary partitions, so create one extended partition covering most or all of the disk and have multiple logical partitions in it. Linux is happy to be installed in either primary or logical partitions.

[tonyappuk]

Thanks Eric. I was aware of the primary partition limitation but it's good to be reminded.
Tony

[tickmike]

Yes one Swap and use a separate Home for each distro (it gets a bit messy with only one !).
You may find that you will have to re-configure the Menu.list and the fstab
You could try them as a live CD and not install them.

[tonyappuk]

Since I don't at present use Linux for my main operating system (too wedded to Windows I'm afraid. (Sorry Eric) every Linux installation I've tried has just used a Home directory, not a Home partition which I think is the recommended arrangement. If I do want to keep anything found whilst I'm using Linux I save it to one of my Windows Folders/Partitions. That's why it's all FAT 32. I know Linux now saves to NTFS but it didn't reliably when I first started to play with Linux. But thanks for your comments Mike. I appreciate the need to edit menu.lst and possibly fstab.
Tony

[roseway]

There's nothing really wrong about leaving /home as a directory in the main Linux partition, but if you make it a separate partition, it can make later upgrading a bit easier. And you can share the /home partition between different distros, so long as you don't employ the same user names.

[tonyappuk]

I have just come a big cropper trying to install Mint 6 Linux to my lovely new 160Gb SATA drive. The problem is apparently known about but I don't know how well known it is. The problem seems to be because Grub, the BIOS and even QParted (Partitioning program) labell the discs differently making the location you want to install to and the operating systems that Grub points to for booting almost impossible to identify correctly. This only occurs with a mix of IDE and SATA drives which is inevitably becoming more common these days. I thought other Forum members with Linux leanings might appreciate the update or maybe the reminder.
Tony

[roseway]

Mint is derived from Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu developers messed up big time with this one. It's not a problem which affects all Linux distros.

[tonyappuk]

Thanks for the interesting response, Eric. The problem doesn't affect Debian then?
Tony