SRS -

Assuming you've got room on it, having dual OS with dual boot capability shouldn't be considered anything exotic. The biggest hurdle is that WinXP (and Win2K for that matter) really do work better with the OS on an NTFS partition, which of course hardly anything else can read. If you partition to isolate the op systems, and keep your shareable data on a separate partition that both can get to, it shouldn't be much of a problem.

Most "clean" WinXP installation probably will format the drive to NTFS, and splitting off a partition that you can reformat to FAT32 or other 'nux usable system may be a bit messy, but can be done. Quite a lot of early Win2K installations were done on FAT32 drives, but we saw a significant improvement in performance when I replaced a hard drive and went to NTFS with our Win2K machine.

John