> I'm going to do a fresh install of Mandrake 8.1 on a dual boot system with 
> WinXP.  I've read that making a 7mg /boot partition makes it easy to use 
> the Windows boot.ini file to choose operating systems.

you don't need that, with recent versions of LILO, and a BIOS made in the
last few years. 
the way it works (if I remember correctly..) is that you make your /
partition the location of the linux MBR; then use dd to take the first 512
bytes of that, and make your boot file from it.
so basically:
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=linboot.img bs=512 count=1
then copy the resulting 512-byte linboot.img file to your windows partition,
and add an entry in your boot.ini file for it. I seem to remember actually
doing this myself, at some point; and it was really simple and quick to do.

at that point, Linux becomes one of the options on your (NT|w2k|xp) boot
menu.

Carl Soderstrom
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
(952) 943-8700