My Experimental PC Harddisk Layout

I’ve finished with my experimental PC (well, not quite) and done with partitioning of the hard disk.

Well I decided to put 5 Operating System inside my experimental PC and now they are coexisting fine inside the shared space of 80GB harddisk.

This time i determined to learn about Fedora Core 4 (i’ve never use Fedora or any Red Hat products seriously before) and FreeBSD 5.x (I only have experience using 4.x branch of FreeBSD and OpenBSD 3.5). So I’ve install both on the same PC.

I’ve put on Windows 98, to test out my home-made program how they react on legacy Microsoft Windows OS. And I also installed FreeDOS to play my old DOS game comfortably, the DOSBox is excellent, but i’ve rather want to relive my younger days with DOS :), besides my FM801-based soundcard is supported under dos, why waste it?

I really want to experiment with Cruxwall (results of hacking crux into easy firewall interface) so i’ve added one more Linux partition inside the hdd. I guess Xen would e suffice if I want to run another Linux-based system.

And why the Windows XP? well the experimental pc is shared by people who arent comfortable with Unix-like operating system in my house, so i’ve to include that. But my own personal PC is running SuSE 9.3 all the time :)

The bootloader? OK, I just use the plain-vanilla NTLDR (Windows XP) bootloader to boot Windows XP and Windows 98. The NTLDR can chainload Grub, which in turn can boot any GNU/Linux system as well chainload the FreeBSD bootloader. :)

I dont use any other 3rd party bootloader, because they tends to be problematic.

Here’s the partition map of my experimental pc

Partition Map, mypapit

And my experimental pc specs is :
Pentium 4 1.70 GHz (400MHz FSB)
Memory 512MB SDRAM
HDD 80GB
1 CDRW, 1 Floppy Drive
2 NIC