Mac Pro - Using 3 drives for a triple-boot system

Hello
I am purchasing an 8-core Mac Pro today, and I want to start the ball rolling early on this endeavor, as it will probably take some discussion and research on my part.
I want to take my Mac Pro and install 2 more hard drives (for a total of 3) so that I can have a triple-boot system using OS X, Windows XP Pro, and Ubuntu Linux.
All of the tutorials I am coming across discuss installing on partitions. I'd like to install onto separate hard drives. What do I have to know in order to make this work?
- Should I use a 64-bit XP OS? Why or why not? (I'll have 4 GB of RAM)
- Any major issues with drivers in XP or Linux?
- Can I make a fourth hard drive mountable across all 3 other OS installations?
- Can I mount the other OS drives in my booted os? (For instance, if I boot into Linux, can I mount the XP drive and the OS X drive, or mount the Linux Drive and XP drive in OS X?)
Thanks for your input.
----------S

I'd like to install onto separate hard drives. What do I have to know in order to make this work?
The Boot Camp Assistant will allow you to prepare an entire drive for Windows so that's simple enough. If you want to do this yourself all you need to do is to change the partition map scheme for the desired drive to Master Boot Record and then let the Windows installer do the rest. Be aware that manually doing this will mean that Parallels will not find this drive as a Boot Camp drive if that's important to you.
Sorry, don't know anything about Linux.
Should I use a 64-bit XP OS? Why or why not? (I'll have 4 GB of RAM)
You can. Although there is currently no Apple driver support for x64 versions so you'll be on your won to source drivers. Personally I'd stick to the 32-bit version for now until Apple pulls its finger out and get 64-bit driver support.
Can I make a fourth hard drive mountable across all 3 other OS installations?
The simplest solution would be the use of FAT32 however Microsoft limits this to 32GB which is a right pain. You could always install a product like MacDrive into Windows to allow you access to your Mac partitions.
Can I mount the other OS drives in my booted os?
It depends on what you're looking for. NTFS partitions are mountable under Mac OS X but are read-only. Mac partitions are avaialable under Windows but requires a product like MacDrive.

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