3 Distros on a single external drive? help?

[Jack_Coleman]

Hi, i recently ordered a Seagate Expansion 750gb USB 3.0 hard drive and i want to put 3 distros on it, Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuSe. i want to put them on the Drive because i go to many different computers and i would like to not have to use windows

What i want basically is for the 3 distros to share my /home folder and possibly whatever folders hold downloaded programs (im not sure what it is, usr/bin maybe, im kind of a new), if thats possible.

Anyway i want to have the hard drive contain the 3 distros and then an extra partition with a couple hundred gigs extra for other files, is it possible to have the extra partition in FAT32 and the linux ones in ext4 so i can only see the extra one in windows. also im not sure how to make it use one bootloader.

Any help?

[jayd512]

What i want basically is for the 3 distros to share my /home folder and possibly whatever folders hold downloaded programs (im not sure what it is, usr/bin maybe, im kind of a new), if thats possible.

You can share your /home folder, and shouldn't really have any issues doing so. But I would advise against sharing /usr/bin. There may be required files from, say, Fedora that could conflict with Ubuntu.

Anyway i want to have the hard drive contain the 3 distros and then an extra partition with a couple hundred gigs extra for other files, is it possible to have the extra partition in FAT32 and the linux ones in ext4 so i can only see the extra one in windows. also im not sure how to make it use one bootloader.

a FAT32 partition for data files, if sharing with Windows can work. I believe you could also use NTFS.
As far as the bootloader, just install Ubuntu last, and put GRUB in the MBR of the external drive. Ubuntu uses GRUB2, which should detect all other OS's for you. And keeping it on the external drive, you'll be able to use your computer normally even when the drive is not connected.

[Jack_Coleman]

So how would i got about doing this? i format the drive in NTFS and then install fedora or opensuse, then ubuntu last, making seperate partitions for each? and then how do i share the home folder?

[devils casper]

You don't have much experience of Linux and I would suggest you not to share /home partition at all. /home partition have a lot of user setting configs and Login sessions depend on those configs only. All three Distros have not exactly same version of packages. If you share /home with Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora, there could be package/version conflicts and things might not work as they usually do.

I would suggest you to create a common partition and mount it in the /home of each distro.

Create partitions before starting installation any distro. 15-20GB each for three distros and 1 GB SWAP partition. You can use rest of space for Data sharing and other things.
** Disable Internal Hard disk in BIOS before starting installation. By default, installer installs Boot Loader in MBR of internal disk and this will mess up everything. You can change this during installation but, to be on safer side, disable Internal Disk.