several distributions on same HD 3952

No problem. I've had up to 12 different Linux distributions installed on a single HD.

Each distro will need at least one parbreastion of it's own.

You may want them to share a singlehome parbreastion so that your home directory is the shared. In order for this to be convenient, you'll want your "normal user" UIDs and GIDs to match across all of the installs.

They can all use a single swap parbreastion.

You can share home paritions if you want.

Creat a single sharedswap parbreastion and a single sharedhome parbreastion. Make the swap parbreastion size 1-2X the amount of physical RAM. The size of thehome parition is up to you -- it depends entirely on what you want to do with the system after it's up and running.

Create a single additional root parbreastion for each distro you want to install. Depending on what all you want to install, you'll need somewhere between 1 and 10GB for the root parbreastions. 5-6GB is probably minimum if you want a fancy desktop like Gnome or KDE.

If you're going to install more that a couple distros, I recommend creating a very small master bootloader parbreastion 10MB is plenty to hold nothing but grub bootloader files required for the bootloader installed in the MBR. I think grub is easier to install-use than lilo, but that's a matter of taste.

Put an entry in that master bootloader configuration to boot each of the distro's root parbreastions (and the Windows parition if you want to keep Windows).

When you do the actual Linux installs, make sure you tell the installer to install the bootloader in the boot record of the root parbreastion, not in the MBR.

That way you end up with a two-stage boot: The initial bootloader lets you pick which parbreastion to boot, then the chosen parbreastion contains the bootloader that was installed and configured by the distro's installer.

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