I'm sorry to do this to you guys, but I've read about 15 different guides on dual-booting Ubuntu and WinXP, and there's too much variation in the information for me to be able to trust a single source, so I'm going to have to ask you guys to help me out.
I'm planning to allocate 45gb to Ubuntu, 15gb to WinXP and a 10gb fat32 partition for file sharing. What's the best method to go about setting everything up?
Right now I'm thinking I'll wipe my drive and start from scratch, then install WinXP first. Once that's done, I'll boot up Ubuntu Live and use GParted to set up my other partitions, then install Ubuntu.
My question is: In which partitioning step should I create each partition in question, and are there any other partitions I should make? One of the reasons for my confusion is that some of the guides have mentioned creating a lot of different partitions (see linked screenshot), but I'm not too sure about that...
http://www.hezardastan.org/breezy_xp_dualboot/en/images/15.png
Also, is the following a good piece of advice? If so, what's with all the different partitions required? And do I need to scale some of the sizes according to my HDD capacity? (70Gb)
* The first primary partition is your Windows partition.
* The first extended partition is a transfer partition for enabling read/write access to files from all operating systems, and needs to be either a FAT32 partition or a FAT16 partition
* The second extended partition is the first Linux partition, and should be set up in the Linux installation process. For only Windows and one Linux version, a 500MB partition is more than enough room. It will be given the label of /boot [500MB in size ]
* You will need to create a partition with the label / [5 GB in size]
* Create a partition with the label /home [remaining amount of space for distribution]
* Create a partition with the label /usr [5 GB in size]
* Create a partition with the label /var [1 or 2 GB in size]
* Create a partition with the label /swap [double your RAM in size]