a little help w/firewire drive please

[yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

Here's my situation:

I just bought a Seagate 200GB external drive. I want to use it for backups, etc. with a 12" Powerbook G4 that runs both OS X 10.3.4 and YDL 3.01.

I'd like to have two partitions on the external drive: 1 for OS X and the other for Linux. First question---does it make good sense to make both partitions bootable? I already used Disk Utility in OS X to set up the OS X partition (HFS+). I placed the "free space" partition first and the OS X partition second per the instructions in the YDL installation guide.

Now I want to set up the Linux partition in YDL. My understanding is that I have to load the ohci1394 and sbp2 modules in order for YDL to recognize the firewire drive. It should then be accessible as /dev/sda. But which tool should I use to do the partitioning? Won't fdisk wipe out the existing OS X partition? If the recommendation is to use Disk Druid, then how do I start it---via the first installation CD?

And again, should I make both partitions bootable? Thanks very much for your help.

Rich