Just a quick note to say thanks for sharing all your grub(y) experiences I was able to get 8 linux distros installed and working on the second HD of my HP desktop. I have a total of 24 partitions I hope to use although a couple of them complained that I had more than 15 and let me know I could forget thinking they would write to any of them.

I did learn immediately that having an NTFS partition first was not going to work. So i ended up with p1 and 2 linux, p3 ntfs, p4 extented (this was an interesting experience with this 1.5T drive. It would not let me create the extended p4, but when I tried to create a p4 swap, it immediately changed it to p5. Later when I did an fdisk I discovered it had created the p4 extended on it's own.) I then when on creating partitions up to 24.

So far i've installed Granular, Ubuntu 8.10, Mint64, Fedora 10-64, Ear MS, Mepis, Mandriva 2009, and OpenSuse 11. All but two played fair and got along. The two that tried to take over the world were Mepis and OpenSuse 11. I ended up having to use a live cd to edit their menu.lst's to bring things back under control They just refused to get along! OpenSuse even tried to format two of the other partitions.

It is great being able to boot my Linux distros from HD 2 and allow them to have full use of the computer and local network. I also have a 1.2T NTFS drive on the same HD for either windows or linux use as required.

Again thanks! John