Dual boot questions

[groundpounder]

Sorry if these have been answered elswhere, but it was driving me nuts getting bits and pieces of info from multiple sources..

what I have is a 40 gig hdd partitioned as follows -

4gb primary with windows98 (recently re-sized from 10gb)

roughly 6gb of "free space" where I was thinking I'd put my linux partitions

remainder (roughly 28 gb) is an extended fat32 partition.

my questions:

what type of partitions do i need to create for linux?

what is the best utulity to use for this and is there anything I need to watch out for?

I would like the data on my current extened partition to be accessible by both linux & windows98 - will this work as is, or do I need to re-create that partition as a primary?

Is there anything else I need to consider? This is my 1st attempt at dual boot... Is there a tutorial anywhere on the web that covers this? The only one I found talked about setting up 5 different windows os' - (hell, one of those is more than enough for me!) then I found conflicting info elsewhere...:rolleyes:

Thanks,
Rich

[JohnT]

Which distro are you installing?

[groundpounder]

Red Hat 8.0

(I also have RH7.3 as an option)

[JohnT]

During install Linux will detect your partitions as you have them set-up. You have the choice at that time at which point you want to install Linux. (Free space). Not sure about RH, but I usually use cfdisk to set up my Linux partitions. Here's a link on partioning insight.

http://www.olemiss.edu/helpdesk/itnews/200003/linux.html