My Ubuntu Hardy Heron + Windows XP Installation. Partition planning.

After first trying and falling in love with Ubuntu I thought I said eternal farewell to Microsoft Windows. Indeed, my Dell Inspiron 8300 laptop which was crawling quite slow and loaded under Windows XP, started to fly with Ubuntu. But shortly after I realized that if I could make without Windows XP, I could not make without some programms, which were supported only by Microsoft OSs, like, for instance, Adobe Photoshop. So I decided to give a try to dual boot installation.

Since I already had Ubuntu installed on my laptop, I used excellent programm called Gparted to squeeze Ubuntu partition and made some space for Windows XP. I installed Windows XP and re-launched Ubuntu with no much hassle, but stuck on making dual booting to set and work properly. After trying different instructions with no success I decided to try, as many say, the most secure method - to install Ubuntu on top of Windows XP.

The rational there is that Microsoft OSs never respected other operating systems and always cleared their booting scripts, meanwhile such Linux systems like Ubuntu learned long ago to respect any other OSs previously existed on users' HDs. It proved right to me - Ubuntu easily found and included Windows XP into its booting menu options.

So now this is what Gparted shows for my HD:

As you can see I have:

- two NTSF partitions, one for system files of Windows XP and the other - for 'My Documents' folder;

- two ext3 partitions, one for Ubuntu installation and the other - for 'home' foldres;

- one linux-swap partition; and

- one extended (/dev/sda4) partition, which contains two partitions for document folders of Windows XP and Ubuntu. (It is handy to keep document folders separately just in case if I will reinstall any of my two OSs.) I had to use extended partition, becase Gparted allows only four primary partitions.