Help needed partitioning second HD for new OS's

[Elv1n06]

I just bought a new 160GB HD with the purpose of installing Slackware and FreeBSD on. That will give me WinXP (finding myself not really using it though ) and FC6 on HDa, SDa is a external 300GB drive formated as NTFS that I use as a network media drive (more or less have this working already), and what I assume will be HDb is the 160GB drive. My question is... I know BSD requires its own primary partition, so that's one down. I figure Slack will get its own partition(s), but I get confused here. I know I want to create swap first, so do I make that a second primary (logical?) partition, then create /home and /usr (or any other suggested partition formats ) as extended partitions of the primary one swap is on? (sorry if this is a little convuluted, just really trying to get a grasp on this all)
Also, I'd like to leave a space for trying out other distros, but again, my knowledge of the partition structure is hazy at best. And last question, is there ANY benifit to how my drives are setup in terms of master/slave jumpers? (I also bought a new DVD DL burner, and as of right now, I have my old DVD burner as a master on IDE1 and my 80GB HD as a master on IDE2. I figured I'd stick the new HD on the same bus as the other HD as a slave, and same thing for the DVD DL drive, but I originally meant for the HD to be on IDE1 and vice versa, so, since I'm about to set this all up anyways, thought I'd see if anyone knows if this is of any importance. Thanks in adavnce,
Elv1n06

[Elv1n06]

Just wondering if anyone can give me some tips on how to get more replies to my posts. I thought this was a pretty straight forward question, and, surprisingly, no help. PLEASE Thanks again,
Elv1n06

[Elv1n06]

Hi all,
I just picked up a 160GB HD that I'd like to run Slackware and FreeBSD on. I have WinXP and FC6 running on my first HD now. I've done alot of research, and the further down the partition/fdisk/gparted road I go, the more lost I'm getting.... and I sorta know what I'm doing (at least I though lol). I've gone from : I'll fdisk HDB into x amount of partitions for Slack, then do the same for BSD. Then after reading on, thought about just booting to BSD install, going through that, and tackling Slack afterwards. Then... the BSD info I've read suggests installing another OS first, and letting BSD use the unformatted space. Here's my issue.... (one of many huh? )
- Where should I be starting? I'd like to have mulitple partitions for Slack, as I'm starting to see the benifits of something like /tmp/ NOT residing on the same partition as say /
- I installed FC6 via the GUI installer, so I have the standard newb setup for that, and I'm hoping to use Slack as a "breakable" distro to learn on, so I don't want to repartition this quite yet
- Is there a recommended hammer out there to bash my head in with? (totally kidding )
- I guess it comes down to this... My experience with fdisk goes back to my gool ole DOS days, and I NEVER needed 16 partitions (drives were too small, it was DOS, etc.), so I'm a bit thrown by the 4 primaries, 1 Extended, then Logical partitions thing, as it applies to my goal. I really want to do this by hand, and gain a true understanding of this, I'm probably going to run Slack at runlevel 3 by default if that tells you anything, but for the first time in a LONG time, I'm starting to feel a bit daunted. Do I start with Slack, FreeBSD, partitioning for one or both through terminal? This doesn't even touch on how I resolve the /boot/ partitions to reside where they need to for both OS's, if I need to worry about that, since I've got win and fedora running fine on HDa, and the oh so joyful task of setting up grub after everything else is resolved ( I'm NOT looking for someone to do this for me, but, as you can tell from my post, I'm absolutly lost. Thanks so much in advance for ANY help I get with this,
Elv1n06