Yankees9920
November 15th, 2008, 09:47 PM
I currently have a IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T61 laptop with a 140gb hd. I have never installed linux before and I am looking to dual boot with XP. The laptop has a hidden recovery partition which has a pre-installation environment for recovery. In addition, that partition has the image for me to reinstall the XP OS. Therefore I want to leave this unharmed, and have it still be able to be accessed with a dual boot setup. I am also looking to have a partition that is shared with both XP and Ubuntu(an I heard I could use NTFS which I think I would prefer).
-It is my understanding that I first want to do a clean install of XP since it is a mess right now.
-After that I think I have to set the partitions, but I am not exactly sure how to set this up. Would I have 1 for the recovery partition, one for XP, one for Linux, one for Linux swap, and one partition for shared data (NTFS or FAT?) I am not sure what order to make these partitions or what way I have to set each up.
-In order to not mess up the MBR I have to install grub to the same partition that the Linux OS is installed?
Is this all or am I missing anything else?
Again, I have never done this before, and step by step instructions would be the most helpful.
Also how can I simply make a backup of the MBR in case I mess any of this up, so I will no screw up that recovery partition.
-It is my understanding that I first want to do a clean install of XP since it is a mess right now.
-After that I think I have to set the partitions, but I am not exactly sure how to set this up. Would I have 1 for the recovery partition, one for XP, one for Linux, one for Linux swap, and one partition for shared data (NTFS or FAT?) I am not sure what order to make these partitions or what way I have to set each up.
-In order to not mess up the MBR I have to install grub to the same partition that the Linux OS is installed?
Is this all or am I missing anything else?
Again, I have never done this before, and step by step instructions would be the most helpful.
Also how can I simply make a backup of the MBR in case I mess any of this up, so I will no screw up that recovery partition.