Dual-boot partitioning

With any luck I'll be upgrading my HD to a huge WD 120 drive in the next week or so. In doing so, I'm going to dual-boot Windows XP Professional and Slackware (and MAYBE FreeBSD or FreeDOS... just for kicks), but I have a question about how I should partition my drive.

Right now, my preliminary plan is to have several partitions on the drive:

- Windows XP OS itself
- Windows Programs
- Windows Data Files
- Linux Boot (where LILO finds the kernel)
- Linux Root
- Linux /home

(my swap partition will be on a different drive for Linux since I assume doing this will make it more efficient)

Now, I haven't dabbled in Linux in over a year, so things could be totally different now... but from what I understand, I have to have that Linux boot partition (where the kernel is) within the first 1023 cylinders on the drive, correct?

Now, if I partition my drive such that the Linux boot partition is physically placed between the Windows XP OS partition and the Windows Programs partition, will that interfere with Windows at all? Obviously I don't want Windows to find that partition, give it a drive letter and tell me it isn't formatted... and maybe accidentally format it. Or would it ignore it altogether? Or is there a better strategy?

Any help would be a greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

- coredumped.

I had it like this

linux
linux
linux
fbsd
fbsd
fbsd
fbsd
windows

give fbsd the mbr
install in that order

I had it like that and it worked well
but I dropped windows and gave the space to fbsd