I'm a linux Newbie, and I'm planning on installing Suse onto my computer, I have two hard drives, a 120 gb HD and a 200 gb HD. I plan to use them both with the 200 GB HD holding the OS. Unfortunately, I'm going to need to dual boot XP, also. So I was just wondering what would be the best way to set up the partitions in the drive. For example, would it be best to just convert each to fat 32? Or is there some other way that would work better?

Thank you.

If you are simply putting the operating systems and programs on one HD and storing all your files on another, using the 120Gb HD for the operating systems will be more than enough room for all your programs and such, leaving the entire 200Gb HD for file storage. To make Linux & Windows equally accessible to the storage HD, its filesystem must be readable/writeable by both. Since Linux has limited writing cababilites to the NTFS filesystem, this would be a bad choice. Fat32 would probably work fine for this since both Windows and Linux can access it quite easily.

Make sure you enable the correct file system support when you comile your kernel.

fwiw, here's how i would do it under the "keep it simple" principle:

10GB for XP (NTFS)
X GB for windows applications and data (FAT32)
10GB for linux OS (ext3 or reiser)
X GB for /home

X is however much you think you will need.

i always make the windows OS partition NTFS when dual booting XP, with no NTFS file support in the kernel, under the idea that that would increase the security of my windows install when booted into linux. whether that's true or not i don't know, but it makes sense to me, at least, since i typically don't need to write to my "C:" drive when in linux. where it might be problematic is doing full disk backups from linux, but i handle the windows side of that in windows and so far haven't had a problem.

gl