Originally posted here by Kain
First off, Linux likes to be on the first partition of the harddrive, as well as windows, so 9 times out of 10 you are going to have a nasty conflict with that. My base recommendation, would be getting two harddrives and setting one as your win2k OS then set the other drive as a secondary Master and drop Linux on it. Afterwards you can write a batch program in a menu format to tell the computer which drive you want to boot off of. Doing this, would probably cause you the least amount of problems. Dualbooting can lead to quite a few problems if you are just starting out.
Huh? Thats strange. Works great for me, always has. Anyway, to the point. WinXP, 2000, or 95 OSR2 and above work just fine on a dual boot box. First part last part, big deal. Here is how I did it.

40 GB HDD, used Partition Magic (yes, you can use fdisk for this if you want to kust use plain old FAT 32 for Win9X or XP) and set a 30 GB partition as NTFS.

Then I installed Windows XP Pro. After full install I rebooted with the Linux (Mandrake 8.1) cd in the drive and booted from it (if your puter won't support booting from cd you can use a Linux boot disk). Then I set my Linux partition and Linux swap during install.

Rebooted and LILO takes over and gives you a choice of boot systems.

No need for a "batch" file. As far as writing a batch file in a menu format, er ummm, you got to be from Mars. I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. Linux already has its own bootloader and many third party ones are out there.