Hi, I am new to linux and would appreciate all the help possible. I have 2 hard drives, one (master) has Windows XP installed (up and running) and just bought a second drive(slave) for linux. Capacity of secong hard drive is 40GB. I have the following questions? 1)Do I have to format the new drive as NTFS or something Linux compatible? 2)I would like to keep first 10GB partition for linux and rest (30 GB) as Windows backup, how can I achieve that? 3)After installing linux on the 10GB partition, how would the system give me option at start-up to choose which OS to start? or do I have to make a bootdisk for linux to start it up every time? 4)how many internal partitions shall I have for linux? 5) would Windows be able to see this drive if linux is on the first partition? 6)Some say I have to use GRUB, what is it and is it necessary to use with linux? By the way, I have got P4/1.8GHz/256MB RAM. Thanks in advance for all the help and guidance..

1)You're best formatting the new drive as FAT32 since both Oss can recognise and use this format. 2)You should partition the drive ahead of time, whether in xp disk management or with some other tool, e.g. Partition magic 3)If you install LILO or Grub to the master boot record on your master drive, it should give you the choice of OS you require. This will normally be offered as part of the Linux install. You should always make a Linux bootdisk.There is an outside chance that you will have to put your Linux /boot partition on your master drive but this is doubtful and you cannot rely on any warnings in Linux. I would leave this until you have Linux installed and only worry about it if you can't boot into Linux from the hard drive. 4)Unless you have specific requirements, e.g. For shared server, let linux install deal with this 5)All the partitions should appear as seperate 'drives' to windows. Windows should therefore be able to see the remaining FAT32 partitions after Linux install. 6)Grub and Lilo are Linux bootloaders. You certainly do need one in a multiboot system. It will give you a choice of which operating system to boot into. If you boot into windows using Grub it calls the (normally invisible) XP bootloader, allowing windows to boot. Lilo is the older bootloader and Grub the newer. Some people still don't trust Grub but I have found it to be fine. One should be included with any significant distribution and set up during Linux install. It isn't hard to figure out.

Thanks Squiff, Everything you wrote is very logical and hopefully will work for me. I will be doing it during this week. Will be back for any more problems... :-)