On Tue, 21 Jun 2005, Troy Dawson wrote:

> Yes you can dual boot. You really don't have to do any extra if you 
> have a whole extra drive. Just use that drive as your linux drive 
> and it's a piece of cake.

Agreed.  I'm usually doing it with just one disk, as it happens 
(laptops, mostly - we don't like managed dual-booted desktops).

Our habit is to have an NTFS partition for XP, which we don't touch 
from linux, and a FAT32 partition (which linux calls "vfat") that can 
be accessed from either OS.  In /etc/fstab you can have it 
automatically mounted, e.g at /win or whatever you choose.

By positioning this shared partition between XP and the main SL 
partition: if either OS partition gets too full, then it can be 
re-sized (e.g using partition magic) at the expense of the shared 
partition, without having to move anything else.

Beware, though, that the linux installer's disk partitioning tool 
(disk druid, is it called?) can create a partition table which 
partition magic declares to be unusable.  See earlier discussion on 
this list.  I've got into the habit of configuring the linux 
partitions by hand using fdisk, which creates an acceptable partition 
table, and then telling the installer to use those instead, rather 
than allowing the linux installer to partition the disk itself.