On Sunday 07 October 2007 14:08, Nick Guenther wrote:

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> On 10/7/07, stan  wrote:

> > I have a new laptop that I would like to set up to have 4 different OS's

> Well all the OSes you listed can just boot directly from the MBR (see

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> biosboot(8) and FAQ #4 http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html), and as

> luck would have it 4 is the exact maximum number of primary partitions

> that a DOS/MBR-based system can boot.

Well that is a bit misleading. 
It's true that you can only have four primary partitions. But you may want to

have a swap drive and others. Which is not a problem as you can actually have

64 partitions by using extended partitions.
I had a similar setup except I also had several versions of Linux (which

shared the swap drive) as well. The total was something like 10 different

O/S's. All managed very well by GRUB.
The trickiest is Windows which wants the first partition on the first drive,

which GRUB can fake with a simple command.
Unless you have some really old H/W you will not have a problem booting from

anywhere on the disk. (I did this 2-3 years ago.)
Then depending on your purpose you may want to do things like separating /var

so it always have the log space it needs, and so on. In the end there's

probably no reason why you can't put as many partitions as you want.  
-- 
Steve Szmidt
"They that would give up essential liberty for temporary safety

deserve neither liberty nor safety."

                                Benjamin Franklin