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You can either use a builtin (fdisk) partitioner, the linux partitioner, or some other external or bootable partitioner. My recommendation, if you have been using windows xp for a while, backup all your files.
Wipe out the entire hard drive. Setup partitions this way
hda1 - Windows XP (size depends, but you won't need more then 15gigs, XP uses like 1.5gigs with sp1, and all the patches. take into accounts software and games)
hda2 - FAT32 for shared files (size can be anything)
hda3 - unallocated, but leave at least 4-5gigs for linux.
The linux partitioner should set it up as follows:
extended partition - /boot at 128megs, swap at 1024megs, / (root) at anything left on the drive
All you have to do after that is setup linux to mount hda2 when it boots, and you have your system.
One other note, you MUST install windows on the first partition, and it must be installed before linux...that way it can write its own MBR. After that, you can setup linux...which you can use a boot disk or have the MBR point at the linux /boot partition, which will set itself up to boot what you want. (if you are using RedHat, Fedora, Mandrake, Suse) Some others are a pain to setup (Gentoo, not recommend for first time linux)
-neo
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