Sunday, November 24, 2019

Would this partitioning scheme work for penta-boot system?

I'd like to have many operating systems on one HD in my laptop. Booting from USB is not an option; I have to boot from the HD.


Is the following partition scheme sensible?


What should I do for swap partitions?


4 primary partitions containing



  • Recovery stuff

  • Windows 7

  • Linux (eg Fedora)

  • EXTENDED partition containing

    • logical drive with Linux (eg Sabyon)

    • logical drive with Linux (eg Mageia)

    • logical drive with /home



This would all be on one hard drive. I understand that there's a 2 TiB limit; the drive is 500 GB so that's okay. I understand that I'd need a boot loader to boot the OSs in the extended partition's logical drives. I plan to use maybe GAG or Smart Boot Manager. (I know software suggestions are strongly discouraged, but I'd welcome suggestions for FOSS boot loaders in the comments)


EDIT: This question is about the particular situation of wanting to have more that 4 bootable OSs on one drive. The user can only have 4 primary partitions with a bootable OS in each. What does a user do if more partitions are needed? Can an OS be booted from a logical drive in an extended partition?

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