1) Easy2boot was
installing the iso of porteus on your device, and
then added persistence for each of the iso copy that you had installed on your device. On this hard disk drive of yours, instead of installing iso copies, you would be better off installing only the content of the iso, which are as porteus is concerned, the /boot and the /porteus folders.
2) You should take advantage of one specificity of porteus over most of the other linux os. You can put many instances of porteus on the same partition by putting them into different folders withe the from= cheatcode. This way you
will make a better use of the space on your hdd. There is really no need to have 5 partitions for 5 porteus installations.
3) I
would like to be able to help you with OSL2000, but it is the first time that
I am informed of its existance. This seemed a quite automated and closed system. There seems to be many bootloaders, and I suspect that some are only variations of the basic ones:
http://alternativeto.net/software/linux-loader/
In the linux world most bootloaders will permit booting of windows and linux oses. The more common ones are grub2, grub legacy, lilo and syslinux. Here on porteus we actually use syslinux and before we were using grub legacy. Personnally, I find that grub legacy is simpler, but syslinux is not much more different.
4) Here is the procedure to install two instances of porteus on your hdd with
syslinux. This is for two porteus installations, just begin with two and then when it works, increment to five. The porteus.cfg file seems huge, but this is because for each os instance, there is an offer to boot into graphic mode, always fresh mode, ... . You can retain only the only the graphic mode if you want, this will simplify your installation:
http://www.porteus.org/tutorials/10-ins ... ition.html
Do not use the save.dat file. Just replace changes=/32/porteus/save.dat by changes=/32/porteus. Here, if you install different installations for the 32bit instead of one 32bit and one 64bit installations you can name the folders /32_xfce, /32_mate , /32_kde ... or the mnemonic tag that you prefer.
But before, be sure that you have
backed up any precious data from you hdd (I understood that there was none now, as you just repartitioned that drive). Then you will have to reformat your hdd with
ext4 filesystem. You can use
gparted on the xfce version of porteus, which is a real nice partition manager. In command linux use fdisk -l to get to know whis is your hdd partion and which is your usb partition. Use gparted to reformat you sda1, sda2, ... sda5 partitions into one sda1 partion.
Try syslinux bootloadeer, if you are happy with it, you will just stick with it. If you want to use grub legacy or grub2, we can have a look at it, or just install it over syslinux.
Do not hesitate to ask any questions. We will be happy to answer you.