[sciguy125]

A second hard drive is the best method. That way, you won't have to mess with your Windows partition. Whether you resize the partition or format and redo it, if you're not careful, you might lose some data in the process.

And yes, to save yourself from a headache, you should have Windows installed before Linux. The problem is that Windows isn't happy unless it's written to the beginning of the drive. Linux, on the other hand, could care less where it lives.

You may also want to keep a small FAT32 partition around somewhere. Linux is able to read NTFS (the current Windows filesystem) but Windows can't read ext3 (or ext2 if you decide to use that). As far as I know, the Linux NTFS capabilities are still experimental. Reading is supposed to be safe, but writing could cause serious problems. The only filesystem that both systems have in common is FAT32.

Good luck. May Tux watch over you and your system.