Hi everyone,

I've been combing various archives on this topic, which whilst richly covered, seems to offer few if any practical answers for late 2008 (some of the best answers are 9 years old).

Basically, to cut a long story short...

If you (as I do) like to experiment with several distros (at LEAST 3 at a time) and have a secure partitioning scheme which allows for seperate /boot, /usr, /home, /data, /var, /temp partitions and each distro to be tried in isolation without settings conflicts from the others, can you (Please!) post your scheme here. I'm all out of ideas. Just your output from "fdisk -l" will suffice.

Many thanks!

CC.

Best will be to keep each distro in its own partition (including /boot). /home cannot be shared ...if you have too many partitions then allow separate /home partitions. Otherwise keep each /home within /.

Use a few common partitions for data. Swap can be shared.

Install grub to mbr ...for just 1 distro.
Install other grub to respective / and chainload/adjust entry

I see absolutely zero advantage to creating that many partitions unless you are setting up a production server (and even then). Swap, root and home are all that I create - and occasionally a var partition when I know that I am going to be running one or more servers. A separate ext formatted boot partition may still be needed if you put root on XFS/JFS.

Note: I give each distro a relatively small home partition (say 5-20GB) and I have multiple larger partitions (one on each drive) for shared data.