im thinking of breaking my big 160 gig drive into two separate partitions: 60 gigs or so for windows, program files, etc.("the windows partition") and 100 gigs for storing my big files("the storage partition"). i would leave the storage partition alone aside from storing stuff in it, but i'm hoping to be able to make an image of the windows partition and be able to restore it as needed. i plan on using ghost 9.0 for this but i have a few questions:

1. i have to install ghost in order to make the drive image but i dont want the ghost installation to be on the image, i only want the basic install of windows xp and the updates, drivers, etc. for the system. am i going to have to install windows and ghost on some secondary drive or computer and then make the good image of my windows partition from there, or is there an easier way? i didnt see an ability to make a drive image when booted off of the ghost cd, only restoration and some other diagnostic stuff.

2. if i restore the windows partition sometime, will it affect the storage partition? possibly re-partition the entire drive into one big partition with the windows image on it or something?

3. i'd like to be able to burn the image to a bootable cd and just throw that cd in and let it extract the image onto my drive without booting from the ghost install cd, etc. you used to be able to do it like this: http://users.pandora.be/soulmaniacs/ghost.html with old versions of ghost, but i havent seen a way to do it with the newer versions(i'm using 9.0) i was hoping they would have built this in or something by now.

4. what filesystem would you recommend for the storage partition so that i can read and write to it from different operating systems?(windows and linux)