Hi I am all new to this have had windows for about 6 years but I would somethig different. Currently I have an AMD 64 3200+ with Windows XP Home. I have two hard drives on it one is a 74 Gig Raptor SATA hooked up to a Asus k8v Deluxe motherboard hooked up to the Via VT8237 controller that has my main operating system on it. Now I have a Maxtor ATA/133 80 Gig hooked up to the Raid Ultra ATA/133 40Pin connector on the motherboard using a seprate controller to run this drive, this is not a serial drive. Now my question is can I have windows on my Raptor SATA drive and Linux on the Maxtor drive then maybe have a dual boot? I don't know also I don't know anything on Linux what is the best program for a newbe like me.

Yes, you can do that.

In terms of custom partitioning, Mandrake is very nice. SuSE is my distro, but is not as forgiving in the partitioning department.

What you want to do is format that Maxtor as a FAT32 drive in Windoze XPee. Then when given install options in mandrake, select custom partitioning. Leave the NTFS partition untouched. Break up hdb into at least 4 partitions,... a root or / partition, a swap partition that is about 2x the size of your RAM (plus a bit extra), a /home partition (for your user accounts) and a FAT32 partition for transfering Linux stuff to Windoze (and vice vera).

sizing:

/ - root partition - 15 GB
swap - swap partition - 1 GB
/home - home partition - 34 GB (nice and big for win programs using wine/wineX/Cedega, and multimedia)
/mnt/transfer - FAT32 partition 30 GB - for moving big stuff around

Mandrake will install a new bootloader called either Lilo or Grub (Lilo is more configurable). You can go with Mandrake community (3 CDs, so a lot of downloading), or find the Pro version in a retail outlet like BestBuy or something (if in the US, if in Europe it may be easier to find).

Mandrake community can be found here:

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en-us/ftp.php3

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/10.0/100PR.php3