I have tried to do this same install and I have never gotten it to work cleanly on one hard drive. Here is what you need to do:
1) Install Windows 8 because it will write over the MBR.
2) Resize partitions because Windows 8 will want it all
3) Install Fedora on the free space
4) Repartition again if you didn't leave free space
5) Install Ubuntu
If you do this all on one single disk you will have a ton of partitions. I think Windows 8 comes with 5 partitions including the Recovery partition. The Recovery partition can be deleted if you have a separate recovery method. Fedora will only need 2 or 3 partitions (if you want /
and /home
separate you will need separate partitions). Ubuntu will also need 2 or 3 partitions, but Ubuntu and Fedora can share the /home
and swap
partitions if you get them to play nicely (not easy). Remember that you can only have 4 partitions, with the 4th being an extended partition. I think overall you can have up to 16 partitions. When you get this many partitions, things start to get very sloppy and hard to manage. What you can do is have a partition for boot, temp and swap shared between linux systems (/boot/
and /tmp/
) in order to simplify things.
What I did, is on my desktop I just bought more hard drives and put each operating system on a different drive. Now on my laptop I only have room for one Hard drive so what I did is I am running Mac OSX and then running Ubuntu and Fedora in VirtualBox when I need them. They run really good in VirtualBox.
Installing 3 operating systems on one hard drive will be a huge process and it might save you a lot of pain to consider alternate solutions.