I just got a larger laptop hard disk today and was thinking about reconfiguring my laptop so I can run both Win XP and Linux on it. I have talk with a few people and they all recommend different things.

1. One person suggest having a separate / and /home partition so that if you need to reinstall, I will be able to maintain my home. Sounds good to me, but wouldn't the new installation have trouble reading the config files in the home (they may not be backwards compatibile with the old config files for example). How would you relink the directories to the new install?

Couldn't I also backup the home and then restore it.

2. Another person suggested that I install /boot as a separate partition so that if the rest of linux is toast, I would still be able to get to the bootloader.

3. Could I have the Windows Bootloader have an option to boot from either the Windows or Linux partition (in the case of the later, it just loads grub and that loads Linux).

Thanks.

1. he's right although i dont use that i just copy my /home folder to a backup drive if a config is not backward compatible its probably renamed and thus the program creates a new config file ignoring the old one

2. hes right also especially if your disk has some flaws or you like to expiriment with stuf that could toast the partition

3. i haven't used/looked into any of that i knoww of some 3rd party software that can be installed and maintained from windows and capable of loading linux but i'm not sure wich this is. i think you should stick with grub or lilo as main bootloader. if you bootloader is toast then you can startup in recovery mode with you windows xp cd and then type FIXMBR to restore windows' default bootloader