Hey everyone. I'm sort of new to this. Dual booting linux and Windows ont he same machine. I'm trying to install Windows XP first.

The problem is... (i have a 80gig hdd) When i create the partition for windows and then when i continue to format it I cant choose the FAT32 file system to format my HDD. I can only choose NFTS...

Why is this so? Can anyone help?

Thanks...

This is because ms don't think you'd ever want anything apart from an NTFS filesystem, especially since most of their users don't even know what a filesystem is.
I assume your hard drive is completely blank and you're doing the whole thing from cds? If you have linux installed already then used cfdisk to create the partition and then install windows on it. Otherwise you could either:
1) Install a minimal linux system, use cfdisk and then install windows, and then install linux again
2) Or you could do what I do, which is:
Give windows an NTFS partition (maybe 3 gigs), and install it. Go and get some free or trial partitioning software for windows and create another partition (FAT32) for windows data (maybe 5 gigs). Get the latest tweakui and set the directories for your user dir, your my documents etc to be on the data partition.
Install linux on an ext3 partition (mine is about 6 gigs), with a swap partition (equal to the size of your RAM), a /usr partition (big - mine's about 10gigs, but I only have a 30gig primary hd), and a /home partition (depends what you want in your home dir - mine's about 5 gigs).
If you have music/videos then you can create FAT32 partitions in between the linux and windows partitions to store all of the data on.

Of course this is just my preference, but I would recommend the windows data partition, because that way you can access all of your windows data from linux, and windows itself sits on the NTFS partition, which is fine because you are very unlikely to want anything from that drive in linux anyway.
Guy

It is because the FAT32 partition you are formatting is too large, therefore only NTFS can be used. If you want to install FAT32 (which I sould recommend as you can read and write to them from linux) break the drive up. The maximum FAT32 size is 32 GIG

The funny thing is that now you say that, I remember having exactly the same problem. Although you can have FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB if you use LBA, but I can't remember how to do that.

I read somewhere on MS's website that W2K will only let you create a 32GB FAT32 partition. I assume that XP is the same way.

How do you want to partition the drive? Create a 10 GB or so NTFS partition for XP OS. Then while your installing linux also create a FAT32 partition.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm using XP pro and that it has more features over the home edition but I was able to create 60gb and 40gb fat32 partitions no problem and install XP to the 60gb partition. In over a year never had a problem with using the partitions. Just upgraded the 60gb to NTFS last November so I can use XP pro's advanced security on the file system for it's my storage drive. Pretty nice features and I don't see why you wouldn't want your XP partition to be NTFS. I agree with everyone else but I'd just make a 6gb partition for XP as NTFS and partition the rest as fat32 to share with linux if that's what you want to do with it. Only reason I see why'd you want to have a fat32 fs. Just my 2 cents.