XP Media Center/ Ubuntu Dual Boot.

Schoning -
I want to suggest something. It's not necessary, just sort of an optional thing that might make you feel better about this.

Is your PC a name-brand or home-brew? Reason I ask is Dells and HPs and such nowadays come with at least 2 partitions besides the main partition where the OS resides. The clutter can make things a bit more complicated.

Take a look at the first attachment. This is a Dell with a functioning Ubuntu partition. dev/sda1 is some sort of Media Center partition, and dev/sda4 is the recovery partition. dev/sda2 is the Windows OS. The PC comes out of the box with all the primary partitions already used up! The guy had to create an extended partition (sda3) for Linux. Good thing Linux can run from an extended partition.

Think of extended partitions as a box. sda3 does nothing except provide a receptacle for sda5, 6, and 7. sda5 is a small FAT32 partition for swapping data back and forth between Linux and Windows. sda6 is ext3; that's the Linux OS. sda7 is linux-swap.

Phew. He had at least one option - copy the recovery partition to some DVD's and delete it.

Now take a look at a HDD of mine. Second attachment. This is a PC I built myself with a plain old Windows CD. Windows takes up just one partition, hda1. hda2 is the extended partition, with swap and a FAT32 partition inside, and hda3 is the Linux OS. Much simpler.

I'd suggest, once you have a Linux LiveCD like Ubuntu or what have you, starting it up. Wen you get to the desktop plug in a USB thumb drive. It should identify the drive no problem and put an icon on the desktop. Start into the "Install" routine. Don't worry, we're going to abort the install before doing anything. You'll have to type in a name and password, etc. You can skip right past the setting up your time zone section. When you get to the partitioning section choose "Manual partition". I'm most familiar with Ubuntu so can't give you details on the others. (I had a heck of a time finding the "Take Screenshot" function in PCLOS.) Ubuntu uses a stripped version of gparted and will give you a map that looks like the attached screenshots. Move the install window to the side a little bit if you have to, go into "Applications">"Accessories">Take Screenshot. Save the screenshot to your thumb drive (it should show up in the list of devices to save to) and abort the install.

Then just close out of the LiveCD session and post your screenshot here.

Some people with store-bought Dells just tossed their Live CD in the tray and let Linux install. The installer was smart enuf to resize the Windows partition, make an extended partition, and install Linux. Others have had to manually set up the partitions beforehand, then install manually. So all that rigamarole I described above may be unnecessary for you.