I'm pretty new to Linux, and partitioning. Well, it seems that every time I try to partition with Partition Magic, the Linux partition boots up fine, but the windows partition goes nuts and has errors all over the place and doesn't want to boot up. Any suggestions? Alternatives?

BTW, I'm under WinXP home.

I'm going to assume you have one hard drive for this explanation.

Firstly install WinXP as the primary OS. Then with partition magic split your hard drive in 2 by resizing your C:\

So you will have win XP on C:\ partition and then create a linux partition with the rest of the HD space you freed when you resized C:\

Now reboot and install the linux distro of your choice.

With this method, linux will take care of the multi-boot all itself! YAY! It will install Lilo or Grub on your Master Boot Record on C:\
Which is Linux's multi-boot manager.

Good Luck

-R

By the way, the above mentioned method is for newbies, and provides the least complications. In my opinion.

-R

Or without partition majic, just when you install windows say you have a 30 gig HD, make a 10 gig partition for windows and leave the other 20 untouched, or 15, or whatever you think is good for windows. When you go to install linux just choose to install on free space.

The parition magic is just a extra step that you really don't have to do.

Thanks guys.

The Windows partition wouldn't work, since the main partition for windows would be only 30 GB of my 80 GB HDD (I have to share this computer with my parents, and they're not geek enough to use Linux).

Thanks for your methods, but I found a way to make Linux and Windows like each other by using the partitioner that comes with Mandrake, a great distro btw.