Nelp Some Help Installing Other Distros

[JQuinton]

Can anyone help me.

I have a 40G Western Digital HDD. I do not have, nor do I use, Windoze. I installed Red Hat 8.0 on my computer and let it take the whole 40GB partitiion. I like Red Hat alot but I want to try other distros as well.

I would like to install Mandrake, Slackware, Caldera, and Suse. Is it as easy as inserting the CD and stratingthe computer. What happend when it comes to the partitioning process? Does it need to be repartitioned?

Or do I need to reformat the hard drive and then make a Red Hat partition and a Mandrake partition, and a Slackware partition, etc, etc?

The mount points give me the most problems...knowing what to tell the compuyer.

Hope I made sense.

Thanks in advance for your help,
Joey

[DMR]

If Redhat now occupies the entire drive, you'll either have to shrink your existing partition(s) or reformat the drive to make room for the other OSes. If you're only going to make a single / (root) partition for each OS the process is pretty simple, but if you want to create multiple partitions within each OS things can get hairy as you'll have to keep track of the mutiple /home, /usr, /, etc. partitions and their device assignments (hda1, hda2, hda5...hdax).

If you do it methodically and write everything down as you go along it isn't that hard, but if you're not totally comforable with partitioning concepts as a whole, I suggest just making a / partition for each OS and 1 swap partition. The single swap partition can be shared by all of the different distros, which makes life a bit easier. Other directories, if put on their own partitions, can be shared as well, but again, that can get kind of hairy to manage.