Juggling Partitions

I'm going to install Red Hat Linux 9, but I'm trying to understand the notion behind this partitioning of drives. Heres the 411:

-I want to dual-boot, with XP Home as my Primary OS

-I have three partitions already, and they occupy the whole hard drive (meaning there is nothing unpartitioned)

-The current partition holding XP is Primary, at the beginning, and is 72 GB (out of 80). I want to install RH using some space I can unpartition from it.

-The other partitions contain backup images, so I prefer not to modify them.

Now, I'm using Partition Magic 8, and it has a feature that allows you to install another Operating System-- it does the partitioning for you, I assume.

I'd rather get input from the AO community than experiment myself. Can anyone assist this total Linux newb in setting up RH9?

Here is what I do.

Using Partition Magic, create 2 LUNIX partitions...one type ext3 for /, and
one for swap. Install LUNIX onto /. When you get to the drive config,
select Manual, select the ext3 you made, edit it and set the
mount point to root, and tell it to format. During boot manager config,
make sure to install lilo to the root partition (i.e. /dev/hda3), NOT the
drive root. Check create boot disk (if using REDHATE 9.0, this is done
after the file copy). Install that shiat.

After the install, reboot with the happy boot disk. Assuming that the /
partition is beyond the 1024 cyl boundary, go to /etc and edit lilo.conf.
Change "linear" to "lba32". Make any other desired changes, save and exit,
and run lilo. Go back to /root. Type: "dd if=/dev/hdxx of=bootsect.lnx
bs=512 count =1" where "hdxx" is the / partition where lilo is installed.
Copy this new file (bootsect.lnx) to a DOS floppy. Reboot to WINDOZE!

Open a command prompt, change to c:\, type attrib -r -a -s -h boot.ini.
Edit boot.ini. At the bottom, add C:\BOOTSECT.LNX="REdHATE LUNIX!". Save
and exit, attrib +r +s +h boot.ini. Copy the bootsect.lnx file from the
floppy to c:\. Reboot, and whammo, you can select to boot to either WINdoZE
XP or REDHATE LUNIX!. If you want to access data on your XP NTFS
partitions, just recompile or upgrade the kernel and add NTFS read-only
support.

:p

--TH13

Can I do something like this. I had Suse 8.2 installed on a hard drive with its boot loader.
Then I installed xp pro on the first partition( suse is on the second) and now I can't boot into suse linux. It sounds like I can do something like you just said to fix this. Can anyone help me?
thanks

Funny how people never have problems dual booting when installing Linux second...but those who install Windows second...Windows won't let them boot into Linux.