Would XP Cause Problems With Linux

[Dolda2000]

How can the second partition be a logical partition? Doesn't a logical partition start after the fourth partition on a drive?

Heh! In Linux, yes. If there aren't any primary partitions in between, though, Windows will see it as the second partition. Isn't Windows just wonderful?

Are you saying that the Windows root partition has to have the boot flag turned on? How about chainloading and it's offset? If a Windows root is the first partition, then we just need to pass +1 to it. If it was the second partition, I supposed this would be fine as long as we can find the offset.

The +1 isn't the offset; it really means 0+1, where 0 is the offset and 1 is the length. So +1 simply means "the first sector of the partition", ie. the boot sector of the partition. So that works regardless of the partition
Anyway, the bootable flag isn't really related to that. Nothing uses the bootable flag, except MS's boot loader. The BIOS always boots the MBR, and Linux's boot loaders always boot whatever is specified is their config files. And I don't know how MS boot loaders work nowadays, but in the former days of DOS/Win3.11/Win9x/WinME, they simply looked for the bootable flag and continued booting from there. Although I don't know how NT boot loaders work, I just wouldn't be too surprised if it was the same.

[Anonymous]

Yeah but surely you will still need to create a boot disk in order to flash the BIOS.