Using Partition Magic version 8 to setup Knoppix Partition

Hi I'm fairly new to Linux.

I've ran several of the live CDs before and am ready to install linux on either a partition or
a second hard drive.

I am running a Gateway GM 5076E. It has a 500 GB hard drive partitioned into two sections.
One is the C. drive and has about 475 GB and the recovery partition drive D. has about 25 GB.

I purchased a copy of Partition Magic version 8. Is it possible to resize the C. drive down by 40 GB
and use that unallocated 40 GB for a bootable linux version of Knoppix? I ordered the current DVD version
yesterday along with the most recent version of FreeBSD. As I understand it from my readings hard drive
can have up to four primary partitions that can be booted from.

Can I have Windows XP Media Center, linux, FreeBSD, and perhaps FreeDOS all installed on their own
bootable partitions?

Would love to be able to install a second hard drive and install the latter three on it.

Only my new Gateway has one of those Raid controllers and a Raid hard drive. All the three internal
connections and only connects to that type of drive. The problem is all of my other previous hard drives
were all enhanced IDE. The computer does not seem to any connections for those types of drives.
Is there anything on the market that would allow me to connect a Raid cable today enhanced IDE
drive. I've tested "Smart Boot Manager" in the past on older machines to decide which drive
gets booted from. The computer I'm using now wouldn't you know didn't come with a floppy drive.
So I can't write "Smart Boot Manager" to the boot segment. It's impossible to do it by writing
it to the partition Windows sets on (NTFS). Could I install it to the D. recovery drive?
It sets on a 40 GB Fat32 partition. I'm not really sure if the computer actually boots off of
the recovery partition and then does a drive letter swap much like the old DOS compression
utilities such as Stacker did in days gone by.

Would appreciate any links to tutorials and forums that discussed creating partitions and running
optional operating systems on computers such as Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, or Dell.

I only have a few minutes, so I'm going to try to answer quickly. You may very well find this resoponse terse.

Yes, you can boot multiple OSs from a hard drive. Since you can have a extended partition with logical drives in it you might even be able to boot more than 4 OS from one drive (the record is much higher). Grub will let yo do it, or you can use a utility like Smart Boot Manager or (my favorite) XOSL.

You may hit booting limitations if the partition is too far into the disk (beyond reported sector 1023). The solution is to have small partitions for the OS and then larger partitions for data.

I do not advoise installing Knoppix. It's a fine live CD, but many problems occur if you try to install it. Consider Debian or some other intended for hard disk Linux.

PM can shrink partitions, but pay attention to the advice to have good backups. Defrag your partition befor trying to shrink it also.

Avoid RAID controlers when trying to share data between Windows and Linux (or other OSs). The problem is that most of the current RAID offereings are not true RAID hardware but rather uses special windows only software drivers.

Out of time, gotta go, good luck.

I switched off the page file to release disk space before defragmenting / resizing. Worked with me but the warnings are there for a reason. Ensure you have backed up all data first!