Boot drive for Ubuntu

I want to dual boot XP Pro and Ubuntu on my machine. Can I use two seperate physical, not logical, hard drives or do the programs need to be on the same physical drive that is partitioned? I will be reformating my drives so how much space should I give Ubuntu to run comfortably? At this point I am trying Linux, it will not be my main OS, but I am more serious than to just run it from a CD.

 

hi,

yes you can dual boot with 2 separate drives, i dual boot this way,

i have mandriva linux on a 40gb drive set as master and windows2000 on a 20gb drive set to slave,
my linux is my primary os and grub defaults to it

grub is only installed on the linux drive and NOT on the windows drive, i have edited my boot/grub/menu.lst with an entry that points to ntldr on my windows drive (very easy to do),

an advantage booting this way is that if my linux drive becomes unbootable for any reason then i can just set my windows to master and alls ok,
or if i lose windows then i just edit menu.lst,

my other drives are formated to ntfs which my linux and w2k can read and write to