Mandrake and Debian on same HD?

[NewbieEd]

How difficult is it to install 2 linux distros on the same HD? I have Mandrake 9.0 working nicely on my HD. Can I install Debian on the same drive?
The HD is 20G. Mandrake is within a 10G partition and the other 10G is currently a DOS partition.
Win98 is installed on a separate 10G HD.

[serz]

Yes you can. If you have enough space free then is not a problem, if you don't, you you will need to use a partition tool to resize partitions.

[brast]

If you do need a partition tool, I'd reccomend FIPS. It's easily downloadable after doing a search for it on google

[ven0m]

Yes it's possible, and you can share the same swap partition with the one you created with mandrake (if you created one),

[Douwe]

Apart from sharing the swap space (agree with that) I reommend a small (20 Mb or so) /boot partition. This should be a ext2 partition. On each distro you install you include this /boot in the file /etc/fstab (man fstab). On it is for each distro the stuff needed for the lilo or grub bootloader, whichever you use.
I use lilo and it works great: at boot time I can choose which distro I will use this time (have no MsWindows, but you can make an option for starting that too). All distros have the same /etc/lilo.conf file. Indeed I have a small shellscript to copy a changed lilo.conf in the distro I am using at this moment to the partitions of the other distros.

[mdwatts]

You can install as many distros as you have the HD space for.

From my recently (not finished) rebuilt system

/dev/hda1 - /boot (primary)
/dev/hda2 - NTFS (primary)
/dev/hda3 - SCO rescue (primary)
/dev/hda5 - SCO Devel (logical)
/dev/hda6 - Gentoo (logical)
/dev/hda7 - Debian (logical)
/dev/hda8 - SuSE 8.2 Pro (logical)
/dev/hda9 - (spare)
/dev/hda10 - (spare)
/dev/hda11 - (VMware images)
/dev/hda12 - FAT32
/dev/hda13 - SWAP

Main distro installed on IDE Raid

/ - 4gb
/opt - 6gb
/usr - 8gb
/var - 2gb

/shared - 18gb