Hello,

I have a new laptop on which I'd like to dual boot XP and NetBSD.  I have
XP on it now, and am about to resize the NTFS partition to set aside space
for NetBSD.  However... this will actually be my second attempt at a dual
boot installation.  The first attempt ended in the NetBSD install trashing
my XP setup - at least, I couldn't boot XP.  It may have been my fault (see
below), but I'd like to hear some "I did this and it worked for me" stories
to bolster my confidence.

What I did the first time: I resized my NTFS partition and rebooted into XP
to make sure everything was cool.  So far so good.  Booted the 1.6 install
CD and installed with the option to use NetBSD's bootloader to boot
multiple OS'.  This is where it got interesting, because the XP setup on
this laptop has a small (< 100MB) "Unknown" partition as the first primary
partition, and I think this might have something to do with hibernation.
In any case, the bootloader menu required me to label partition 1 (which I
obviously don't want to boot from), partition 2 (XP) and partition 3
(NetBSD).  I foolishly changed the type of partition 1 from "Unknown" to
"Unused" and then I didn't have to include it in the menu.  I finished the
NetBSD install and then after a reboot, my XP partition could not be
booted.  I got some error message from Windows about a missing DLL.

What I'm thinking of doing this time is just setting up menu items for
partition 2 and 3, leaving 1 as it is.  Then perhaps after the install I
can remove the menu item for the first partition from the bootloader setup.

Thoughts, advice, anecdotes, etc appreciated.
--
Bryan