[gentoo-user] Dual booting Dell with Windows 7

[Mick]

Hi All,

I bought a Dell XPS laptop which seems to have 3 primary partitions.  The 
third partition is where Windows 7 resides, while the second partition is 
flagged as bootable.  The first partition contains some Dell (recovery) tools.  
I am lead to believe that the second partition is the back up partition and is 
meant to be used to restore the OS in the third partition.  This confuses me a 
bit - shouldn't the third partition which houses the OS be flagged as bootable 
instead?

Anyway, I do not want to interfere with the Dell/MS Windows OS way of booting, 
at least until the warranty expires.  What is the recommended way of dual 
booting with Gentoo?  In the past I have either installed GRUB in the MBR and 
chainloaded WinXP from there, or I have installed GRUB in the Linux partition 
boot record and then used NTLDR to chainload grub from the MSWindows 
bootloader.
-- 
Regards,
Mick