in that instance you should be ok, as long as your extended partition is the last partition of the four primary partitions. for whatever reason i think you can't make logical partitions after you've made a primary partitions after your extended partition.

example

if you made these partitions in this order it would not work
30gb hard drive

100mb primary
10gb primary
10gb extended
10gb primary
5gb logical

if you tried to make those partitions in that order parted would not let you.

but if you made them in this order you should be good.

100mg primary
10gb primary
10gb extended
5gb logical
10gb primary

at that point you've only used up about 25gb leaving another 5 gb open on your extended partition.

now this is only my experience with parted it may not be the case and i may have been doing something wrong i just wanted to warn you if something popped up and said that you couldn't make any more logical partitions even though you had space on your extended partition, as in my case when i first used it.

i don't think with mkpart you have to specify a file system. however you do want to use (fspart?) something like that at least, to set your fat32 partition. after that id just let the oses set up their partitions.

the PART-TYPE should be hda1-7, right? no the part type is either primary extended or logical.

you have to remember that with parted once you make a change the effects are immidiate, meaning that if you partition a something you didn't want to you can't just puch cancle and quit and go back to how you had it before.

don't be affaid to play with parted and try out different partition scheme. i'd recommend doing it even if you know for sure how you want to set it up parted is a good thing to know a bit about.

good luck

i have installed both Mandrake 9.2 and XP fine at the end.
i have tried to use parted, but in the end, i didnt really need it.
in fact, when i put the XP cd in, and it has got an option to partition the hard drive, so i used it to format about 30g in fat filesystem, leaving about 50g untouched.
i installed XP first ,then installed the drivers.
after that i put the Mandrake cd in and let it install Linux in the untouched 50g partition, it installed fine. when it is done, and the bootloader installed itself.
when all is done, reboot, and i could choose to use XP and Linux from the bootloader, so i guess it is quite alright.
now, all i have to do is to configure the hardware problems (internet and video card) for Linux. i reckon i could go and look around for the soluation here.
by the way, thanks.

im glad things went so well for you. i was wondering if you could post your partition setup? i unfortunatly didn't have that easy of a time installing a dual boot and was just wondering what might have been different in our partition setups. thanks

it was a new hard driive and got nothing on it.
first i boot from the XP cd, there was an option to choose how to partition the hard drive, so i created a 30g partition using that option. XP would start formatting the 30g, and leaving the rest of them drive untouched. after formatting, it installed itself.
when that is done, i boot into XP form hard drive and installed all the drivers, and had a look at the hard drive. only 30g of the hard drive displayed, as i have instructed.
next, i boot from the Mandrake 9.2 cd, and choose to install it on the rest of the hard drive, which is after the 30g for XP. after that, Mandrake installed itself and when it is done. it reboot itself, and XP and Linux can be chosen from the bootloader.

the partition set up:
/dev/hda1: (XP) 30g
/dev/hda2: extented (Linux) 50g
/dev/hda5: ext3 (Linux) /boot 5g
/dev/hda6: swap (Linux) 500m
/dev/hda7: ext3 44.5g


to be honest with you, it was pretty easy, i guess it was because of Mandrake. i know fedora is a bit different, i didnt like Mandrake at all so i got rid of it, i tried to install fedora, had to use partition magic and follow your instruction. i havent had fedora installed yet, because of the problems with the cd, so i cant really tell you anything about dual booting XP and fedora. anyway, i will let you know how it goes with fedora and XP when all is done.