Breezy & WinXP dual boot on Dell Dimension 8400 (SATA RAID)

[Sean Hammond]

I'm looking into installing Ubuntu Breezy to dual-boot for a family member.
The computer in question is a very fancy Dell Dimension 8400 (
http://reviews.cnet.com/Dell_Dimension_8400/4507-3118_7-30919189.html)
currently with Windows XP installed and taking up all the disc space.

I noticed the machine has a Serial ATA-150 hard disk interface, suspect
there might be some sort of fakeraid thing at work here (the specs page
linked above says storage controller type: RAID, storage controller RAID
level: raid 0, raid 1).

A friend of mine previously tried to install Breezy dual boot on a machine
with SATA fakeraid and it didn't work (or at least the Ubuntu installer
didn't immediately detect his fakeraid partitions and it was too much work
for him to try and he quickly gave up). That was a completely different
machine though.

So out of interest I booted the breezy install CD to see what disks it would
detect. The guided partitioner offerred me two install options - both were
to erase the entire disk, one of them was to use LVM, the other not. So the
guided options are not an option.

The advanced partitioner gave me two options I don't think I've seen before:

Configure software RAID

and Configure Logical Volume Manager.

Not sure exactly what either of those options means or what they would do
with respect to the existing Windows partitions.

The installer does appear to have detected the Windows XP partitions. Here
is the information it gave me about the already existing partitions (all 3
partitions included a smiley face icon beside them, and #2 also had a
lightning bolt icon with it):

SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 160.0GB ATA ST3160023AS

   #1 primary 65.8Mb fat16 /media/sda1
   #2 primary 156.9Gb ntfs /media/sda2
   #3 primary 3.1Gb fat32 /media/sda3

When booted into Windows XP, in the My Computer dialogue, only one disk is
shown, an ntfs disk which it says is of size 146Gb. So there seems to be a
bit of a discrepancy but I suspect the partition Windows XP shows me is the
#2 partition from the Ubuntu installer. Not sure what the other two are, but
suspect they're something to do with this RAID setup.

So what I would want to do is to shrink that huge partition #2 and install
Ubuntu in the space made. I don't want to break XP and its RAID partitions
in the process, or prevent XP from booting, or anything.

So... can anyone tell me if it is safe to use the Ubuntu installer here?

Has anyone dealt with Breezy dual-booting on a machine like this before?

Can anyone tell me any more about what the Ubuntu installer is telling me?

And exactly how should I go about doing the install, just use the advanced
partitioner to shrink that one partition and make the Ubuntu partitions in
the space created? Or do I need to use one of the Configure RAID or
configure LVM options?

Thanks for any help

--
Sean's mailing list bin
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