I want to set up a dual boot with FC5 and XP.

I have two drives, one with XP (80Gb) and one with FC4 (40GB - upgrading to FC5 after dual boot setup).

I want to repartition the 80Gb so that it will have space for FC5.

Is it possible to create a partition using the free space on the windows drive - so I do not lose any data ?

I tried dual booting from the two drives, and the BIOS could not find an OS :S

Was gonna make the 40Gb FAT32 for common data storage.

Yes, you can find several guides here.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...GUI_Multimedia

Good luck.

theres nothing there on partitioning :s

I installed Mandriva on an older computer whose harddrive was in use by windoze.

This is what you need to do:

1. Defrag Windows. Make sure all data is compacted to the beginning of the drive.

2. Backup Windows. Explorer should tell you how much of the hard drive it occupies. That is your guide to sizing the windoze partition.

3. Install Bordeaux (as I'm about to do). Doesn't the Fedora installer have a partitioning tool? If it doesn't (which would astonish me), you could get systemrescuecd which does. knoppix may include a partitioning tool also.

Define the first part of the hard drive as a windoze partition and divy up the rest the way you want it.

Run MS Defrag first like the others recommend. Then download and burn the LiveCD of Gparted Live (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php). Reboot your computer with the Gparted CD and you can repartition your NTFS drive. Its very straight forward, just click the partition and resize then apply the changes. If not read the docs.

There are several guides there on dual and triple booting. I suspect at least one of them covers some partitioning information. In any event there are a couple of other good answers here.
Good luck.