ok it's always hard when you're installing multiple OSes... god knows how many reinstalls I had to go through to get it right... I'll offer some advice here...

which operating system will you be using the most? Will you be sharing files between operating systems a lot? if sharing files between OSes is your thing then you probably want to make a large common fat32 partition. Win98, Win2k, and BeOS will be able to access it...

I'm thinking it's better to place the swap partitions on the 4.3 gb hard drive to increase performance through parallelism but I'm not sure if the speed of the 20 gig hard drive will make up for that...

The order in which you install the operating systems will pretty much determine your partitions... personally, I like to separate my operating system partition and my program files partition. This way if I need to reinstall the OS, I don't lose the data in my program files.

as for the order of installing... I'd try this order, linux, beos, win98 and win2k... make sure you with Linux that you install LILO at the beginning of the partition and not the MBR... win2k has a built in boot manager that should detect the other bootable partitions. Remember that bootable partitions need to reside at the beginning of the hard drive... I think with in the first 1024 cylinders...

so build small partitions for each operating system, have one or two large common data partitions, and swap partitions on the other hard drive. Also be careful when installing on the ATA66 controller of the BP6... some OSes might not recognize it... I often have to install on the regular ata33 connection...

If this is the first time you're doing something this massive, prepare to be there for awhile... if things don't go exactly as planned, then just try other things... have fun with it... and make sure you document your installation process when you get it right so you can do it again


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Hardware Editor - SystemLogic Network (www.systemlogic.net)