Hi. Heres what i am wanting to do. :) I currently have a 35Gb hard drive and what i want to do is create 2 partitions. I want the one partition to be around 10 GB and on this partiton i want to install Linux 9. With the remainin 25Gb I want to install Windows XP Professional as an operating system and this will be mostly used for games. How would i go about creating these partitions and when the computer starts i want it to ask me which operating system i want to use. Thanks :) Jay

Both Linux and XP have built in boot loader which will detect O/S on C: drive and install it, automatically on XP, not sure how Linux does it.

Install XP first, as if you put LINUX on first then the XP boot loader will OVERWRITE the LINUX boor loader, GRUB or LILO. The XP is a normal install, if you are FAT 32 file system. Then install LINUX, at which point it will ask you to RESIZE the WINDOWS partition, provided it was all ONE BIG PARTITION to begin with. OR, you should best pre-partition for LINUX (after your XP install) and then install LINUX and then tell it put LINUX on that blank partition. Be carfeul so as not to have it overwrite the XP partition, while installing WINDOWS, as if you do, then when it starts, you'll lose all your WIN data.

Thanks, so would it be best to format my computer creating the two seperate partitions ready for windows xp pro and linux? Also, would it be possible to have 3 partitions? 1 for linux, 1 for windows xp pro and 1 for files from both operating systems?? Thanks. Jay :)

=============================================================== You will probably want a total of 5 partitions. The linux file system f2ext is not compatible with FAT32 and therefore can not be stored on the same formatted partition so there are 2 partitions right their. The next two partitions are for the Windows and Linux operating systems. The last partition will be a small 10-100 megabyte partion that Linux uses as a swap drive to simulate virtual memory when needed. borelli34