Dual Booting FreeBSD or Linux with XP

Will I have to install either FreeBSD or Linux on a separate partition as Windows XP? And will there be any conflicts and stuff? I wanna use FreeBSD but if there would be problems I'll settle with Linux. I haven't decided which distro yet but that'll be later.

Seems the best way to do it, not all bsd/linux distro can write to an NTFS partition , also if your bsd/linux got fubared somehow at least your windows partition wont be affected.

Ok, never mind the first question.

So I have an 80GB harddrive where I keep all my media and stuff and is currently where Windows is installed. I'm about to get another 40GB drive where I'll install a fresh copy of Windows AND FreeBSD. Now how much space should I allocate for each?

My main use for Windows is simply gaming so I'm thinking 10GB for FreeBSD and 30GB for Windows or maybe 15+25, what would be best?

>>2

Alright thanks for that though. Took me a while to decide what to write on >>3

>>3
i'd keep the size of both partitions down and make a third FAT32 partition to keep general stuff on.  Both Windows and Linux (probably FreeBSD as well) can read and write to FAT32 without trouble. 

>>5

Wait a minute. My 80GB drive is currently formatted to NTFS. Does that mean that FreeBSD won't be able to read the stuff on it?

And is there another good filesystem that's compatible with both Unix/Linux based OS's and Windows XP that supports single files larger than 4GB (isos)? It'll be mainly for my media.

Windows will be installed on its own NTFS partition and the other OS will be FAT32 or something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

Pretty much FAT32 is the only one where linux and windows will be able to write AND read, using other file system will require either windows or linux to use a "driver" ( http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO-5.html ) to access either's file system. The thing is.... for your ISOs are you going to use it on Windows or FreeBSD/Linux? If it's for windows only then just keep it at your separate 80gb NTFS drive.

>>6
There's experimental NTFS support for OpenBSD, it's probably also in Free and linux. You can READ a NTFS drive but not actually WRITE, last I checked.

>>9
All Linux distros have been coming with a stock NTFS read only filesystem that's pretty solid for years. Problem is it's read only. The write version is unstable, and it's not unstable in the "pres butan panic kernel" way, but in the "pres butan fuck up your files" way which is why you shouldn't use it yet.

You can actually write correctly to NTFS now. The problem is that you can't change block pointers.

That means you can't do the following:
-change the size of a file if the file would not expand into empty space
-create a new file

You can edit an existing file as long as either the size remains the same or becomes smaller, or the new data isn't fragmented on the drive. It's a big gamble and usually a last resort.

>>11
Insightful
So what happens when that happens? I mean, if I activate writing on NTFS somehow, and an application tries to create a file, will it get a permission denied error perhaps?

>>12 If you mounted it correctly you'll get a permission denied error. If you didn't you'll fuck up your partition.