Disclaimer: I'm "new again" at partitioning drives.  I used to be an FDisk "power user"? back in the early 90s when DOS 3.3 was my main OS.  It's been almost 20 years, and I'd like to partition my drives again.

I bought an EeePC 1000HEB "NetBook".  It came pre-loaded with WinXP on a 160GB HDD.  It appears that this HDD was pre-partitioned at the factory into 3 primary partitions.  Looking at it all with GParted (from a LiveUSB bootable 8GB thumb drive), the drive currently looks like this:
/dev/sda1 = NTFS 146GB flags=boot
/dev/sda2 = fat32 6GB flags=hidden, iba
/dev/sda3 = unknown 39MB

Primary partition #1 is obviously the operating system, and part #2 is almost surely the "system recovery" stuff.  I have no idea why there is an unknown partition with nothing on it, but I'm not quite comfortable blowing it away just yet.

My desire is to tripple-boot this laptop with the current XP, as well as adding 2 more OSes of Win7 RC (to play with) and an Ubuntu OS.

I started off by altering the main partition down to an 80GB partition, leaving roughly 65GB to play with on the other 2 OSes.  I would probably divvie that up into 40/20 for Win7/Ubuntu respectively.

On my now-unallocated partition, I thought I would break that into 2 primary partitions, but when attempting this I got an error that I could only have 4 primary partitions.

So my questions are... am I going about this the best way?  Should that "unknown" partition be deleted, or is there some standard these days with the built-in self-recovery features that would require this partition?

I've read the excellent "partitioning strategy guide" on this site, and am bit confused... it looks like the "advise" was to create several primary partitions, meaning that my "4 primary maximum" is not the norm?  Was I reading that right?

It should be easy enough to whack that unknown partition and make a Linux partition... but what if I wanted 3 or 4 more OSes to play with?  Why is there a 4 primary maximum?

Anyway... this is a great site - I've spent the last several hours reading what I could find, and going over past forum posts.  Hopefully, I can get this solved with some help in these forums.

Thanks,
Jimmy

if that 39 mb partition is taking one of your primary slots, that would be a good reason to 'blow it away.'

file system?

you're not gonna recover much with 39 mb. probably just the goverment's way of keeping an eye on you. 

i even deleted my 6 gigger, which you can safely do if you use ghost or some similar cloning util.

if you want BootItNG lets you use more than 4 primary partitions.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm

good util.

brian like it & uses it. the search function should find good threads for you.

you can boot windows from extended/logical.

i think this also applies to linux (ext3), but not positive.

you only get 4 primaries and you should try to limit this to 3 .. for reasons i can't explain right now.