I chose to post this question on this site and forum because the questions posed below seems to be based around the hardware and workings of a hard drive in relation to how operating systems work. I have one 1/2 terabyte hard disk and wish to use three or more different operating systems but still have access to my personal data on all OS's while making the system re-install and upgrade proof(allowing me to do either with ease and without loss of personal data). So far the outline I have for how to implement this after a lot of research is as follows: Primary ....| System reseved(windows7) Primary ....| Windows7 Extended ..| ........................| SWAP ........................| Ubuntu ........................| Ubuntu /home ........................| Kubuntu ........................| Kubuntu /home ........................| openSUSE ........................| openSUSE /home ........................: free space (for future OS) Primary ....| Data partition(ntfs) .........................- /shared (all Linux distros will link the video, music and doc folders in their home partition to this Data partition with symbolic links) .........................- windows7 program files Questions: I know at least as much as the fact that this will reduce performance to some degree, but by how much? Will the performance reduction outweigh all other benefits? Secondly will this also reduce the lifespan of the drive because of the extra work done by the reading heads moving between partitions? Thirdly in the event that I add a second hard drive, could you give a rough outline as to which partitions should be moved to that drive or how the setup should change? Also is it worth replacing the windows7 system reserved partition with a boot partition? Is there anything else other than the above questions that need to be pointed out? I know that's allot of questions and I suspect that this configuration may or may not even be feasible but any feedback to any of these points would be appreciated. My purpose aside from making use of this multi-OS setup is to also write up a complete guide for such a configuration as there are many programmers and other tech users that would like a complete setup like this but there aren't any sources online that cover it all without the user having to do allot of searching and researching to put it all together with different sources advising different approaches. So your help will help more than just me. Thanks for taking the time.
