Fedora Users — Much trouble getting dual-boot working

There's so much conflicting advice out there (put it in the MBR! Don't put it in the MBR! etc...) that after six unsuccessful tries, I'm just throwing myself at your feet and begging for mercy... :-)

1 120G SATA drive, came pre-loaded from Dell with WinXP on an NTFS partition. I used Partition Magic to setup the following partitions:

In this order on the drive...

1. Very small Dell Utility partition
2. A 200MB ext3 partition to use for /boot
3. A ~60G NTFS partition with WinXP on it
4. A ~55G ext3 partition to use for /
5. A Swap partition with the rest of the space

I put #2 where it is because I read that the boot partition should be before the 1024th cylinder.

I then installed Fedora Core. It can't create a boot disk because it says it won't fit on a floppy. :-/

In the Grub configuration, I've tried both to install it to the MBR and to the first part of the boot partition. Neither of these work - the machine still boots into WinXP directly.

If I use PartitionMagic's BootMagic utility to tell the machine to boot off of partition #2, I get the Grub menu, and Fedora boots just fine, but WinXP errors during boot.

If I then use BootMagic to reset the boot partition to #3, WinXP works again, but the machine boots directly to it.

So my questions are now:

1. Do I have the partition table correct? 2. Where should I install the boot partition? 3. Do I have to start the Fedora install over yet again, or can I just reset the bootloader settings to the right stuff? 4. What's the proper sequence from the start so that I can do this correctly on the first try next time?

Really appreciate your help - I've never had so much trouble setting up a dual boot, but it's never involved NTFS before. :-(

Thanks,
Fran

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Fran Fabrizio
Senior Systems Analyst
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama - Birmingham
fran@xxxxxxxxxxx
(205) 934-0653