On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, John Seago wrote:
There would also seem to a problem with the rest of my rather elderly computer recognising the whole of the 40 gigabytes, it seems to be able to `see' only 33 gigabytes of the new disk. Some opinions hold that when divided into separate drives it will be able to `see' the 40 gigabytes, whilst others hold that the rest of its innards need upgrading to be able to recognise the whole 40 gigabytes.
this sounds like a BIOS problem, how old is the motherboard? you may be able to get a BIOS update so you can "see" the rest of the disk or you may have to fiddle around with the hard-disk parameters in the BIOS. Unless you overcome this it is very (read not) unlikely that you will see the last 7Gb.
As for how many distros can you get on 1 disk, I once did an experiment with a friend and a 4Gb disk, we managed to install in no particular order
MS-DOS 6.2 Win3.11 Win 95 Win NT (server & workstation) Solaris 7 Netware 5 Redhat 5.2 (or maybe 6.0) SuSE 6.1 Debian 2.1 one of the BSDs Beos 3
and possibly some others that have slipped my mind. the most fun part of this experiment was working out which order you had to install things in as making sure that one OS didn't overwrite another OSs bootloader.
Now I make that at least 11 operating systems, so I challenge you to put around 110 on your new disk with minimum repetitions ;-)
Adam