Dual-boot: Just be sure to install Windows first, if you have to install both; at least for a time (years ago) I remember reports that the Windows installations would wipe out any Linux installations.
Howya sion!!
Well, I have got a really good Windows PE disc with lots of gee-whiz geek tools on it -- a gift from my guru. I can boot on that CD and have wide-open access everything on the hard drive including the registry hives. So, in a sense, I already have a sort of dual-boot capability.
In fact, that's how I do my backups. I have my 200GB drive in a removable drive carrier, so I shut down my system, slide the 200GB drive into the bay, turn on the machine and drop the PE CD in. The computer is set to boot from the CD so it will come up in Windows PE. At that point I simply run Ghost to make an exact image of my 160GB primary drive on the 200GB backup drive.
Now, let's say my 160GB primary drive fails tonight. I have an image on my 200GB pullout drive, but you can't just swap that 200GB into the case in place of the dead 160 and be okay, and it's at this point that the average user will think they CAN do that, try it, and proceed to almost irreversibly break their XP installation.
If they win that game of Russian Roulette, their system will be the one-in-a-thousand that actually does boot successfully. If they loose, XP will be a total wreck and will have to be hacked in order to be broguht back to a bootable condition. This is tantamount to a resurrection and is beyond the ability of most users. Even fewer actually have the tools they'd need to achieve success at that point.
My beef with MS is that this is their fault, that no operating system should be this picky, and that they have shoved this off onto the user community who, for the most part, are completely unaware of the potential disaster they face if they suffer a hardware failure.