Quote Originally Posted by ping
I'll bet there's an answer already waiting to be found on this forum, but I'm still having problems to figure these matters out

As you can assume I only have one hd which is partitioned into hda1 and hda5. I have winXP on hda1 and only media files on hda5 and both partitions are NTFS. Now I would like to have knoppix installed on the free space(7gb) of my hda5. Is that possible and how? I would also like to share files between os:s.

My main problem is the partitioning the hda5. I assume that lilo shouldn't be saved in mbr but instead in root partition? I think i'll be a lot wiser if I could get some details about the partitioning and anyway I'm grateful for any kind of help.
zap hda5 and turns in into FAT32, that is the only way you can SAFELY share file. Well since you are going to redo the partitioning anyway, just leave some space for linux so hda5 becomes hda5, hda6, hda7 with one of them FAT32 and the rest your liking and install linux(and lilo). After that, just dd the first 512 byte of that partition, copy it to C:\(better put it on the FAT32 and copy from there to C under XP) and add an entry :

linux=c:\hda6_bootsector

where hda6_bootsector is the 512 byte you dd from /dev/hda6 and copy into a file.

Now you have a dual boot under XP and a partition to transfer file in between.

Of course, you can also search the forum about my posts on how to do this without even repartitioning, a few months back. You are lucky as you have 2 partitions, my notebook has only one large one for XP which is also NTFS and I just don't want to repartition.