Setting up partitions for dual-boot (w/ WinXP) via Intrepid installer

[Eberhard Roloff]

Mike.lifeguard wrote:
> Yes, I do recognize the need for contiguous disc space. I've luckily
> discovered 'JkDefrag -a 5' which should do the job nicely. So once I do
> have a big block of empty space, the Intrepid installer will resize the
> Windows partition and create partitions for Ubuntu on it's own, yes?
> 
Excellent. Thanks much for the information about JKDefrag, I never heard 
of it before.

It depends. Actually defrag orders the files on a diskpartition in a way 
that they will all be located at the beginning of the disk.

This does not correlate to the amount of free space on your partition. 
The amount of free space will be indentical before and after defrag.

You just arrange your partition contents so that applications like 
qparted will be able to effectively shrink your partiton with the lowest 
possible risk of data loss.

So after having removed fragmentation from your windows disks, the 
question will remain, where you will want to free up space to install 
linux.

Try is out. If the installer fails you most likely will need to 
rearrange your partitions.

For this I would recommend to use a Boot-CD like RIP Linux, which is 
just 70MB and you can use gparted with it.

Please note two things:

Disk reconfiguration is not for the faint of heart and you should know 
what you are doing.

If you value your data, you will have a recent data backup handy, that 
you will need, if all else fails.

If you are in doubt, just come back to the list with questions before 
you possibly will screw up things.

Kind regards
Eberhard