Adding new partitions to EeePC 901

To get another Linux OS installed on my EeePC 901, I needed to add two new ext2 partitions to the 16 GB drive. So, I used Unetbootin to prepare the bootable USB key with Parted Magic installed on it. Note that Parted Magic didn't work for me on the EeePC due to the version of glibc being older than 2.4 so I had to do this on another computer.
To get the USB key to boot the steps are as follows:
1. Plug the key into the operating computer
2. Reboot and hold down the F2 key until you see the TTy1 screen show up
3. When the BIOS screen is available, tab over to Boot
4. Arrow down to Hard Disks -- now you should see two HDs followed by a USB Flash drive
5. Use the controls (the '+' sign) to move the USB Flash to first position
6. F10 to save and exit

Now you should be on your way to booting from the USB key
However, in my case at least, I kept getting kernel panics. The error given was

EXT2-fs error (device ram0): ext2-get-inode: unable to read inode block

In googling around, it seemed this problem may be due to ramdisk_size being too small.
So, on the next boot into Parted Magic, I used the Tab key to edit the default option. As it happens, the last entry in the command line was

ramdisk_size = 25000

So, I just changed this to 250000 and booted.
Now it started fine and I was able to use Gparted to generate the needed partitions on the 16 GB drive without any problems.
When booted back into Xandros, I found I was only able to mount one of the two new partitions. I posted to the forum about this and it turns out that even though the unmountable partition /dev/sdb3 had been generated in Gparted, it still needs to be created when back in Xandros.
I used the mknod command given in the post and this worked fine.

Ext2fsx -- still struggling withthis

A day or two after I installed ext2fsx from here, two (of my eight) Linux OSes (all Ext3) showed up on my desktop and could be read (but not written to).
Then a day or two ago (after maybe a week) they disappeared for no apparent reason.
However, I decided I'd see if I could get them back. So, I went into ExtFSManager and tried to mount each of the two that had previously mounted (Ubuntu / and Ubuntu /home).
They errored on attempted mount and suggested trying disk repair.
So, over to Disk Utility and I tried to repair both and, surprisingly both repaired without errors. Back to ExtFSManager and I was able to mount both without problems. What's more they mounted at boot for at least two more boots.
Flushed with this success, I tried to repair a few (if not all) of the remaining, hitherto unmountable ext3 partitions but all gave the same errors.

Verify and Repair volume “UNTITLED”
e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
/usr/local/sbin/e2fsck: Resource busy while trying to open /dev/disk0s7
Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program?
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

Even afetr I unmounted the two mounted partitions, I got the same behaviour.
If I tried to mount, despite the repair not working, I got this

Command: Mount
Device: disk0s7
Message: Unknown Error (The filesystem may need repair. Please use Disk Utility to check the filesystem.)
Error: 0xC047

So, it really seems like there is something different about the other 6 unmountable partitions although I really have no idea what it could be.
I posted to the SourceForge forums about this and who knows if I might get the answer here.

Number of partitions on sata HDs limited to 15 by libATA

Well, I learnt something today.
The older Pata HDs apparently could be divided into unlimited partitions but the newer (and soon to be exclusive) Sata drives limit you to a maximum of 15 partitions.
Yes, I knew about the 15 partition stuff but didn't know that there are still some distros that support non-libATA stuff and therefore let you go higher than 15 in the number of partitions.
From what I can see, openSUSE 10.3 and Mandriva 2008-1 are in this group.
It is suggested by ardent multibooters that you should put swap partition and the / and /home for all distros that use libATA on the first 15 partitions. Then put the non-libATA OSes on the higher number slices.
I learnt a lot from this thread and, indeed, this seems a useful forum for multibooters although the few threads I read involved some heavy detailed stuff.

Gparted and Philips 169GB usb HDD

Since I got the MacBook, I've really hardly at all used the Philips HDD. So, with the experience I gained in recent days with FreeBSD, I decided to (at least) try to put FreeBSD on the usb HDD as well as possibly others such s Solaris and Arch Linux (of which I've heard so much -- being very well documented with a lively forum).
Of wha was already on there I've only kept the DSL and the 80GB ntfs partition.
In retrospect I probably should also have kept the Mandriva partitions as my recebt attempts to get Mandriva working on the Mac from the Seagate HDD have been unsuccessful (even with MCNL which worked without problem on the Philips).
The resizing/repartitioning changes I made with Gparted were very time-consuming but particularly due to the 80GB ntfs partition.
As this is probably not going to change either in size or formatting in the near future, it probbly would be a lot better to have this as the very last partition. Then everything else can change as necessary while leaving this one untouched. I believe that would greatly speed up the Gparted activities here.
Another noteworthy observation is that the FreeBSD filesystem (ufs), although present in Gparted's lis of available filesystems is actually grayed out. Not sure what this means, but could be that Gparted just can't handle partitions with ufs formatting which could be a problem in the future if I manage to get FreeBSD working from this device.