adding linux to a second harddrive on a XP system

I just installed a second hard drive on my computer which currently runs xp. I d like to have a dual boot system, is there anyway i keep all the windows stuff on my primary hard drive and install red hat on the spare drive. If anyone has any info please let me know. By the way, I m pretty new with linux and naturally assumed that Red Hat would be the best choice, if there is another build that would suit my needs (mostly math software with perl and c++ programming) I would be open to those possibilities.

Thanks in advance

Check out these two tutorials:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-19999.html
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-30442.html

They should help you with configuring grub to run both Windows and RH, once you install it. 8)