So I’ve decided to do a dual boot on my new laptop (Toshiba A200-28P). One reason being that I need it for my final year project. I’ve never previously run dual boot, always had Win on my laptop and used the Linux labs at CS, but they run CentOS and I don’t really like it that much (and I’ve used Ubuntu previously on a very poor PC at home though I didn’t install that).
Anyway I cannot be hanging out in those shitty labs every day so I’ve decided I’m going to need both (keeping Vista for gaming purposes), but do have a few questions though:

Where can I check if my hardware is compatible with linux / where are drivers available? Or should I just go for it and hope for the best.

I will need to access certain data from both OSs, so should I have a third partition for data? What format should it be so both can read and write effortlessly? I know Linux has come a long way with NTFS recognition and writing, but I somehow still don’t trust it.
The Toshiba comes in really odd partitions (two 92s and one 2GB) and I definately want to change that so that I ideally have 100GB or so just for data and can split the rest between the OS. This way I won’t ever really have space issues. I’ve lived with 20GB for some time on XP, so I think I will be able to handle 40.
Short injection here – I’ve never had an OEM OS before… does it let me partition the HDD as I want or will it try to recreate the same setup? I’ve got some disc, but who knows what that is, seems to be just for recovery :s

I can’t think of anything else really. I’ve used linux plenty and I’ve read up on how the whole dual booting should work, it’s just that there doesn’t seem to be much on interaction between the two.
I’ve worked a lot with the Knoppix live cd as well as CentOS so that’s not much of an issue.