A question about at which point I should start.

Current situation...
- XP Home Edition (up-to-date)
- One (1) NTFS HDD 80 Gb
- E:drive with CD R/W,
- D:drive with DVD R
- Booting Knoppix from E: works just fine, although the fact that I have (just?) one processor is reported as an error

Desired situation
- Dual Boot
- XP preferred OS
- 20Gb partition for Linux.
(In this I will install Tomcat, JBoss and a database most likely MySQL or Oracle 9i for J2EE compliant web application -deployment-)
- Performance is not an issue, it's the system for new release tests, etc.

I have no knowledge about physical HDD, exact differences between FAT16, FAT32. NTFS, more? I am used to work with operational unix systems. I have worked with a dual boot Windows2k, SuSe 7.1system a while back. I remember that I could read my Windows files from within SuSe. I have installed Oracle 9i on that system. The unix sysadmin prepared this system for me.

Now I have to do the job by myself. I do NOT know HOW-TO
- split 80Gb NTFS -> 60Gb NTFS + 20Gb FAT32
(I assume Unix does NOT work on NTFS)
For software I have the new PowerQuest Partition Magic 8, correct choice? Haven't got a clue how it works though. It's still in the box.

I am looking for pointers, links to HOW-TO pages. Reports from people who went to the same process. I know things can go wrong real bad.

Anyone knows if System Recovery on Windows XP works in this kind of drastic system changes?

Any help is appreciated.

Kind Regards,
jCp