Is it pretty easy to set up a dual boot? I was going to set up a partition on a hard drive with linux, but haven't looked into what was involved with doing that. I'm thinking that I only need to set aside a few GBs on the hard drive for linux?
There's an application that came with Red Hat that gives you an OS choice at boot. This has been a while ago, so I'm hazy on details. It worked fine until I accidentally messed up a driver or something, so that Linux wouldn't boot. At that point, I couldn't get it to boot anything, because this little application sat at some very low-level place and intercepted my boot attempts.
What I ended up doing was keeping Windows and Linux on separate drives (let's face it - how many more or less useless 500 meg or 4 gig drives do you have in a drawer somewhere? They're fine for Linux) and booting to the Linux side, as desired, off a floppy.
The neat thing is, Linux can read MS-DOS-formatted drives, so I could store all my big, clumsy data on the big DOS drive, and just keep my programs on the little Linux drive.
Works like a charm every time. When you boot up Windows, it doesn't see the Linux drive at all, keeping your linux install safe, and Linux can read the windows drive very well. The new 2.6 kernal can even write to NTFS partitions now.