hi, At the moment I have a 120gig drive partitioned to C: (20gig with XP pro installed) and D: (100gig for data storage).

At the weekend I'll be getting another 120gig drive which I plan to partition to 15gig ( Red hat 8) and 105gig (data storage).

The new drive will on the same IDE channel as the XP drive and configured to act as slave.

What I want to do is leave XP installed on C: (disc 1) and install Red hat 8 on what effectively will be D: (disc 2) on the slave disc.

I'm a total noob to linux, I use unix at uni sometimes but havent never installed or dual booted from it.

Any help would be very appreciated
Cheers
Jon

As long as Windows is installed first, and Linux second, you should have no problems at all. Redhat's installer will let you choose which disk and which partitions to use, and it'll automatically configure itself for dual booting with Windows.

By the way, you probably won't want to install Redhat all on a single partition. So the idea of C: and D: is kind of a misnomer (And Windows isn't likely to be able to read your Linux partitions anyway - though Linux can easily mount Windows partitions. XP's filesystem, NTFS, is a little trickier, but can be done).

The installer should give you the option to automatically divide up partitions appropriately, once you select an empty (unpartitioned) disk (such as your 120GB slave disk). Search around for partitioning information for further details, if you are interested.