I have a hard drive with windows xp pro on it. I am going to use ntfsresize on knoppix 3.7 to reduce the size of the the filesystem then use fdisk to resize the partiton to make room for linux and a swap partition. My intial plan was to install grub to the mbr but learned it can not boot windows directly. So i found out i need to make a boot partion. I am aware of the 1024 cylinder limitation (and others) so my plan was to move the ntfs partition foward to make one. But someone told me that is not possible. Now my question is if NTLDR is going to pass control to grub does grub still have to be in range of the bios or could it be anywhere on the disk?

Don't know what you've been reading, but try and get something a little more current.
Make room for Linux, then use either Windoze or grub as your bootloader. There are threads a-plenty about this.

The 1024 cylinder boundary issue is history.