Don’t Dual Boot! Use Virtual PC 2007 Instead
I just read Edgar's interesting comments to one of my previous Vista-related posts and took special note of his 3rd and 4th points where he said:
(3) The system does not come with any discs for the installed software; though I think that a boot disc for Vista can be purchased. Perhaps hard discs are more reliable than my diskette fileing system.
(4) The lack of backup discs makes me leery about trying to install Linux, since that involves changing the Windows Vista partition, always a nervous activity.
Edgar: The last time I bought an HP PC (about 5 or 6 years ago), it came with an option to create recovery discs on a series of CD-R discs. Check to see if your HP has that option.
More importantly though, unless you have some special requirements that requires Linux to have native access to your notebook, you should definitely consider installing Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 instead and use it to run the Linux distro of your choosing as a Guest OS on a Virtual Machine. I've used it to run Fedora Core, CentOS Linux (another Red Hat variant), SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu. Virtual PC is free. So, the price is right.