Partitioning guidelines for Linux FC4

Hello, everyone! I need help with the following.

1) I want to install Linux FC4 on my 100GB Seagate USB hard drive using my IBM T42 laptop. I don't want to use the logical volumes that come with the default partitioning scheme. I want to use physical volumes only because I had problems booting Linux using logical volumes on USB hard drive. Can you suggest how I should partition this drive? I also would like to have a 10GB VFAT partition so that I can share it with Windows.

2) I have a question about installing GRUB to configure dual boot. FC4 installation gives me 2 options to install GRUB

Install Boot Loader on:

/dev/hda Master Boot Record (MBR)
/dev/sda1 First sector of boot partition

/dev/hda is the laptop's hard drive which has my Windows XP installation. Is it safe to install GRUB on the Windows hard drive MBR? I heard that it might cause problems with booting windows after the Linux installation as it overwrites MBR.

I did try this weekend last. The issue remains that the needed default drivers are not loaded on Fedora boot, even when I re-did my initrd file to include the needed drivers. I ended up with a kernel panic, which means, from what I saw, that the drive was not being read correctly.

I would not do this on a main production system. The chance for error (not being able to boot your XP system on the thinkpad) is too high. If I find a solution, I will post it. Grub will need to reference the usb external drive and this is too dangerous to chance.

I did not install to the MBR, as I did not want to chance this on my production system. Instead, I did what I do not recommend, I attempted to boot straight to the usb drive, using Grub installed on the MBR of that drive. This kept Grub off my main hard drive to test the process.

I got a Grub boot screen, but a kernel panic. This means that the bios booted from the usb drive, but the drive was not read properly to load the Linux root filesystem.

Until then, if anybody else has the solution, please let krispenmetsa know.