I pretty much agree with rickenbacherus as far as his partitioning, but if you're getting a 20 to 30 GB drive then why not make a /home partition of 5 GB or so , then if you reinstall linux, knoppix or another distro, your home stuff will still be there (you may have to change ownership after a reinstall but everything saved will be there, including customizations). The other thing you may consider is a 5GB or so /store partition that would be formatted vfat (fat32), then you have a safe place to put stuff that you could get to from both linux and windows (note: you'll have to do some fixing to be able to write to the vfat partition as a user). I put mp3's, software downloads, iso's etc. on my shared vfat partition. You do not need a boot partition that is 100 MB (25 to 30 is huge), I have 3 or 4 kernels and grub on this computer and /boot takes up 5.6 MB, although what's 75 mb on a 20 or 30 GB drive, I wouldn't make /boot less than 25MB just in case.

Also put the drive where you want it and then install knoppix there, for safety put lilo on your root partition and make sure to make a boot floppy. If you install knoppix as hda (your first drive) and write a boot floppy etc. you won't be able to boot up as hdb (your second drive) untill you either manually edit your boot floppy configuration or boot into the system from a knoppix cd and fix your system from there.

I am a Chem instructor (labs and developmental) I haven't used ChemDraw in recent years, but once you get knoppix installed check out xdrawchem, it is ChemDraw file compatible and is in a deb package so it's easy to install:
apt-get install xdrawchem
it may not be as feature rich as ChemDraw.


I use my own personal linux computer in my office so I don't have to rely on sharing a computer, I use openoffice a lot as it has pretty good ms office compatibility.

HTH

rock