partition setup

[ninja]

I have two questions

1 - has anyone got any suggestions on a good partitioning scheme i have two hard disks hda 30g and hdd 40g, my bios doesn't allow me to set hdd as bootable. I would like to be able to run three os's windows, redhat and gentoo?

2 - does the / partition and /boot partition have to be primary partitions?

[reverius42]

I have two questions

1 - has anyone got any suggestions on a good partitioning scheme i have two hard disks hda 30g and hdd 40g, my bios doesn't allow me to set hdd as bootable. I would like to be able to run three os's windows, redhat and gentoo?

2 - does the / partition and /boot partition have to be primary partitions?

To answer your questions in reverse order:

I'm not sure about the /boot partition, but I know that the / partition doesn't have to be primary. It can be wherever you want it to (probably even on the second drive, if /boot is on the first).

If you want to really stretch, you could probably put /boot on the second drive as well, and just install grub into the bootsector of the first drive. But that's pushing it...

As far as running the three OS'es on the two hard drives, here's what I would do:

- hda1: Windows partition (install this first!)
- hda2: /boot partition for RedHat and/or Gentoo - share it between them if you're courageous
- hda3: /boot partition for RedHat/Gentoo, if you're afraid to share it
- hda4: Extended partition, using the remaining space on the drive
- hda5: swap partition (can be shared between Gentoo and RedHat afaik)
- hda6: / partition for RedHat
- hda7: / partition for Gentoo

Because you've divided that drive up so much to put all the OS'es on it, now use the second drive to store all of your files!

- hdd1: fat32 (vfat) partition (create this from Windows!)

And there you have a place to put mp3's, movies, whatever files you want. And it can be used in all OS'es.