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If I install linux on my 2nd HD which is aprox 30 Gigs do I still need to worry about all this W2k MBR editing stuff, and could anyone tell me a good size for each area (Root, Home, var etc etc))

You will still need to install lilo and make sure your MBR is correct.

The root, var, home, etc directories are all normally part of the / partition. This can easily be less than 500 MB on a 30 GB drive!

The rest of the drive can be a nice /usr partition of about 5 GB and
the rest on /usr/local ....... (don't forget to add a swap partition, at least the size of your RAM, some people go 2XRAM for swap, but that was in the old days when RAM was rare and expensive. Now, with 128 MB and 256 MB RAM common, swap is rarely needed).

Of course, there are other ways to do this....