/dev/hda and /dev/hdb on new PC

I had bought a 40g HDD and installed it on my old PC a IBM PC300gl Celeron 500 64mb RAM
I wanted to try out networking. This requires lot of time and also lot of experimenting. Also the old PC does not support booting from CD and there lay the problem. I have to disconnect the drive connect it to my mew pc install what I want and again install it back in the old pc.
This was not happenning. So i decided to remove the HD from the old pc and attach it to the new pc as primary slave.
I was partly successful. Bios detected the HD but after 2 tries. It was detecting as 32 gb instead of 40gb. After lot of fiddling and changing the jumper settings and finally removing all jumpers except one I got what I wanted. Still I am unclear on the jumper settings and what I did to make it work.
There is a hidden burning desire in me to try those first 50 or maybe 100 distros mentioned on distrowatch for e.g.ike Kanotix/DSL and of course freebsd and LFS even though the principles are the same.(based on RH/Deb/Slack) This desire erupted one fine day and I made the above changes.

Now I have 80g and with 20g gone for Win XP and assuming I keep 2 to 3 gb free space and on an average 4.5g for each distro(it may vary) I can have 12 distros on my PC(this may include one bsd). Wow!!!!!!
Now I have FC3(full)/Debian 3.1(25/04/05)-only base and mc,Slackware without KDE and Gnome on /dev/hda and Ubuntu on /dev/hdb

Worst part is my landline is dead for the past 1 month and hence no net connection
I am searching for a broadband(so called) subscription and no one is appraoching me. Finally I will have to rely on MTNL's ADSL.

Need to seriously devote some time in learning open source programming, well it could be any thing maybe just learning bash/emacs/vim anything.

I forgot my Debian root password and have messed up trying to recover it. I think i will have to reinstall it again.
Suse has become opensuse. I was never attracted to try SUSE basically because it was preconfigured and there was not effort required and yes it was not free. But many people in the world use SUSE and now I am getting interested in trying it also.

Some of the Distros I wish to use but do not have copies
DSL(have an old one),Kanotix,Slax,Minislack,Arch,Scientific

Will write about my progress on programming etc