Hi all first time posting and i just brought RH8 after many many years of windows use..OK i have WIN XP PRO and i want to dual boot...is there any FAQ or online guide on how to do this..like which OS to install first,how much space should i give to each partition, can i format my windows half useing NTFS and still have rh working..thanks all

yeah its been asked thousands of times, use the search function on this site to look up answers.

but here's what i know,
each partition can be a totaly different File system, so u can have ur NTFS for windows, and ur EXT3 for linux, (is that what u were asking)

Ohh, and in redhat 9, using the auto-partition on installing it made 3 partitions...

a boot partition (100 megs, but im currently only using 10% of that)

a swap partition (defaults to double the amount of physical ram 500 meg for me)

and the main partition, how big u want it ? i would recomend minimum of 6 gig, 2 gig for linux + software. and a few more gig for games / whatever.

The Red Hat documentation should discuss this fairly well also.
Some general stuff:

Often Windows is installed first and Linux second. This allows a Linux bootloader to be installed without being overwritten by Windows install.

NTFS is supposed to be the better choice for Win XP. I would use that. However Linux can only read from NTFS (not write to). It is not a bad idea to create a Fat32 partition for sharing files.
Red Had needs to be fiddled with to read NTFS the last I heard.

Partition sizes depend on how big your hard drive is and what is important to you. If space is tight, you can get by with 3GB for you Linux partition and still be able to try stuff. Go for at least 5-6GB if you have the space.

I would start with a blank hard drive. Create the partition for Windows XP either before or during the install (leaving the rest free). Format during install (this insures the correct filesystem is created). Confirm your Windows XP install boots and works. Created and format the FAT32 partition from XP.

Definitely read some documentation and decide what you think will be best for you. Pay attention to you choices for bootloader installation.

I would definitly suggest installing redhat first. Don't let it auto partition though. My advice would be to make the boot and swap partitions (i'm not sure how big, i'd go with whats erlier in the post) then make around a 5 gig partition for XP (NTFS), same for linux (ext3) and the rest make a data partiotin (fat32). This way you can put programs on one of the drives for each OS and then all data can be accessed from either.