Need help partitioning 4 OSes

[crobusa]

I'm trying to partition a 80 gig Western Digital drive to run XP/W98SE/DOS/LINUX (Slackware), but I'm confused on how to plan it. I just purchased Partition magic 7 to try and help with this. I've had some experience in the past installing 98 and NT, but some of this is new.. especially the large disk problem. (Never worked on a drive bigger then 10 gig)

According to PM, everything but linux needs to be on a primary partition. So..
Dos (fat16)gets 2 gigs as 1st primary
98se(fat32) gets 20 gigs as 2nd primary
XP(fat32) gets 20 gigs 3rd primary
Linux gets 20 gigs as 1st logical part of a 4th extended partition
That leaves 18 gigs of the cake free. Do I need Linux Swap?

But there is a "Boot Code Boundary" of 8 gigs on all of the OSs, (Dos has a 2gig boundary)
How do I get all of these under the limit? Do the partitions have to be under 8 gig or just start under..

After reading this thread here,
TheCorm suggested putting the XP/98 apps on their own partition. Should that be primary or logical? Then should the system partitions be less then 2 gig?

Thank you very much for your time!!

 

[TheWart]

bump for my own interest. i do know that linux needs a swap partition/drive.

 

[aceO07]

I'm no expert on this. I've only done a dual-boot.

For the Windows partitions you can have them smaller (4gig?) and just create a single (logical) data partition for both.

Linux doesn't require a swap partition. I had 256MB ram when I last tried Linux, and didn't use a swap partition.

 

[crobusa]

Having a data partition sound like it might be the best way in the long run. But order for the registry and setup files to be correct for both Win98 and XP, the drive letters need to be the same, right? Since C: Must be Dos's main disk, it must have the first primary partition, right? Or does Dos arbtrally call the first FAT16 part it sees C:?
(I've got tons of legacy games from a few years back.)

 

[aceO07]

The way I've done it is, the OS I select to boot from will be the active unhidden primary partition. The other partitions with operating systems would be inactive and hidden. This results in the system knowing only about the partition which the current OS is running off, since the others are hidden. This is a reason for the data partition, since you can share data amongst all your OSes.

So, whatever OS your going to use, that's the partition which will be called C:.

From my experience, I've just installed the same windows application each time for the different Win OSes.

 

[Cuular]

one important thing to remember is that the "boot" partition for linux must be in the first 1024 cylinders. You can create a small 16MB partition for that, to keep it happy. If you don't have it in the first 1024 cylinders you will have to create a boot floppy to get linux to boot.