It's been a few years, but I don't recall having any problems with clean-installing a dual boot set-up so long as WinXP is installed first. But it's possible I was running WinXP on FAT32 then rather than NTFS. I don't remember.
At the same time, I think it's far more useful than dual-booting to run Linux as a virtual guest on a VM running atop a Windows host. Doesn't work so well for me the other way around because WinXP runs like molasses on a VM. I agree on multiple defrag runs if installing Linux after Windows has had time to fragment the NTFS partition. It also seems to matter quite a bit which defragger you use. E.g., Diskeeper 2007 does much better for me in consolidating files at the beginning of an NTFS partition than Diskeeper 2010. Best regards, Paul _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
