I would advise against dual-booting. It was always a pain.
Really? I never had problems with it, although I use swappable hard drive cartridges in my machines, a separate hard drive for WinXP Pro, and another one for whatever flavor of Linux I'm playing with at the moment.
G98:
What you describe is not the typical dual-boot situation, where there is one (or more) hard drives with one boot sector, and multiple OSes. Your method is much cleaner & less trouble-prone than the usual DB.
Thee are a couple of reasons I am not a big fan of dual-booting:
1. Boot loader woes.
2. blasting the original OS when installing the second (not as likely as it used to be)
3. (The biggie, to me) sharing data between the two OSes:
MS does not play nice with other OSes and makes it difficult for non-MS folks to properly deal with NTFS. There are linux tools that can tap into & manipulate NTFS, but if used regularly, you WILL corrupt your NTFS data. It is a matter of time and/or read/writes.
So, that leaves one with the not-so-wonderful option of having (at least) three file formats & partitions: ext3 for linux, NTFS for Windows, and FAT for data partitions you'd like to access form both. FAT may be fine for flash memory sticks, but I don't want to put it to hard use in mission-critical applications.
The virtual machine route is much cleaner, especially nowadays with dual-core processors and relatively cheap RAM. I usually choose for the installed-on-hardware OS to be the one that has the apps with the greatest performance demands. If it is a toss-up, I install linux on the hardware.
