I have 2 hard drives, an 80GB and a 120GB. I have red hat 9 and all its partitions installed on the master drive, the 120GB. GRUB is installed on the master drive as well. Will I be able to properly dual-boot if i install XP pro on the slave drive (80GB)?

Also, xp setup asks me to free some space on the master drive. Is there a ext3 partition resizing tool i could use to create this space?

Here's my suggestion, this is based entirely on what I did, I don't know why/how it worked, but it worked.

Using a harddisk swapper I only had one drive plugged in during install, so they were both Masters.

Install Windows XP on one drive.

Install Redhat 9.0 on the other drive.

Plug both drives in at once.

Set the Redhat drive to Slave, edit the BIOS to boot from the Redhat drive.

At this point only Redhat will show up in GRUB.

Edit /etc/fstab, change the place where is says /dev/hda3 to /dev/hdb3.

Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf, add:

title Windows XP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive

at the end.

This should work for you, .

Don't worry about what XP says, it's a BS thing from MS. In the old days, if you used a non-MS version of DOS (there were many versions of DOS back then), and tried to install Windows 95, it would give you a "warning". It still worked fine, but the warning scared many people into buying MS DOS.

To remedy this, just unplug the first drive, set your second as the main drive. (As if you only had the second drive in your computer.) Install windows. Then, when finished, put your drives back how they were, with your Linux drive as the master, and the windows drive as slave. Reboot, then edit grub and add windows. Should work just fine that way.

XP just wants to beleive that it's the only OS on the system (so much so, that the "license" says you're not legally entitled to run XP alongside another OS). Doing the above, you basically allow it to think it is the only OS, and you fix the problem later. Ain't it great being an Evil-Doer?