| Dual booting has nothing with filesystems to do, it's only that linux has no official write support for NTFS, so you can read from the NTFS partition in linux, but you can't write to it. That's because Microsoft keeps NTFS a closely guarded secret, so everything that has with it to do has to be reverse-engineered. (Windows can't read linux filesystems at all)
Anyway, you'll still be able to boot even if the filesystem on the windows partition is NTFS. A tip could be to put in a FAT partition that both windows and linux can write to, to be able to transfer files from linux to windows, if you'd ever need that.
The partitioning can be a little tricky. If you're lucky, you just need two partitions, one for windows and one for linux. Remember to put windows on the first one, though, or it will fail, since its boot sector code only uses 100% compatible IBM PC features. (Yes, that means that windows' boot sector code could be over 20 years old, which it probably is)
If your BIOS is buggy or old or the like and doesn't have good LBA support, you'll need a boot partition for linux, though. That must be put as the first partition on the drive and be like 50 MB or so. It will only contain the files needed to boot the system (such as the GRUB config file and the kernel itself). The reason it must be first is because BIOSes without LBA support can't read further into the disk than 1.6 GB or something around there. I don't remember exactly where.
Since it's so small, it won't disturb windows either.
Just remember to use GRUB as your boot loader. |