As a dedicated multi-boot user, and support for Windows from 95 through XP Pro, I must agree that having a separate hard drive for each OS is the easiest for a beginner to set up. I can't afford that luxury all the time, and neither can most.
Having 5 OS's spread around 3 hard drives can be daunting, and without tools such as scanreg (thanks to win98's (in)stability problems) things would be worse. It works fine, even though Win2k and XP were loaded after 98, so I don't understand that bit from jmatt.
Fortunately, MS has generously provided a boot loader with 2k/xp that actually works, although it still has drawbacks for the new user.
Not everyone has Partition magic, nor Ghost (or any other piece of relatively expensive software) close at hand, and we all prefer getting something for free if we can, that will do the same job.
For a multiboot loader, I prefer XOSL from
Nice GUI, easy for the beginner to use. Cheers,
Jim