Knoppix install how-to on a 5th partition

I'm no linux pro (far from it) but have experimented with it for about a year. I have SuSe 9.1 pers. running on an older Dell P2 & have tried several LiveCD's. I think at this point I'd like to try a full install of Knoppix on my newer machine, a self-made P4 3.2GHz H/T with three drives. I've just installed the 3rd, a 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax+10 which is hooked up to an Intel D865GBF-PERL mobo via a SIIG Ultra ATA/133 PCI card. Using Vcom System Commander I have set up 4 Windows XP Pro installs (100gig total) 80 Gb I want to leave for data storage & future OS's but in the last 20GB's I would like to install Knoppix. I have run the LiveCD version (3.8.1) on both units & it works fine. My question is: Should I allow Vcom to partion the 20gig sector (claims it can, would format 19.5GB EXT3, 500MB linux-swap) or just leave the last 20gigs unformatted & have Knoppix choose how to do it? In addition I'm not clear about the difference between what I'm seeing now with this liveCD version and what the resulting Debian install will be. The main reason I like the LiveCD is it's easier for a novice such as myself to accomplish things. What I don't like is that I can't really save or download anything since it has no permissions to access the drive it's running on (unless there is a way to set that up).

Any advice on these questions would most certainly be appreciated.

>I have set up 4 Windows XP Pro installs <

here I am not sure if this goes well. in general you might have only 4 partitions maximum on one disk. You can make 4 primary partitions for the bootable windows and one lexpended partition and here you can include all your logical drives including one for the linux.
I would recommend not to try to produce more then 4 primary partitions on one drive. This could end up in a desaster.

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Originally Posted by ottosykora

....You can make 4 primary partitions for the bootable windows and one lexpended partition and here you can include all your logical drives including one for the linux.
I would recommend not to try to produce more then 4 primary partitions on one drive. This could end up in a desaster.

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The partition table is a fixed size space at the end of sector zero track zero surface zero. Because of the number of bytes it is always limited to holding only 4 partitions. No more. One of the partitions can be an extended partition, which means that it defines a space on the disk that is treated as having "logical partitions" who's partition information is contained withing the extended drive, not in the partition table (getting past the 4 slot limit). But you can't have 4 primary partitions and one extrened partitions, you can only have a maximum of 4 real partitions, a combination of primary and logical partitions.

Nothing too awful wil come of trying to create that 5th partition, the tools just can't do it. They all know of the limited size of the partition table.

There have been some software programs that try to play some "tricks" to get more primary partitions. One trick is that they build a partition table of many partitions elsewhere and swap in 4 of them into the partition table space depending on what OS is being booted (the entire remainder of track 0 is normally unused since sectors must start on cylinder boundries and is often chosen as a place to "hide" this uber partition table, but using this space can lead to other problems). This lets you have many partitions on a disk but only 4 of them can be seen at a time. This is rather risky though, since other software doesn't know about the extra larger partition table. So other tools that look at the partition table or that try to restructure the disk will ignore it and very likely destroy data. And unfortunately, there are many things that try to grab that "unused" space in track zero, many copy protection scheemes and virus writers have tried to grab space there too, for example. Since it's space outside of the normal partitions and since people seldom document what space they are grabbing (certainly not the copy protection people or the virus writers) and there is no official central place to track this space, there is a chance that any data placed here will be overwritten. That's not an unacceptable risk to a virus writer, and the copy protection people don't seem to care much if their customers are inconvienced either, but it will ruin your day if you have a huge partition table stored in that space and your latest tax package decides to write all over it. So it's best to avoid software that plays such games with the partition table.