Installing Ubuntu on an XP machine

I've got a simple but important quetsion:
I've got one huge partition with XP (pre-)installed on it. (Let's ignore Lenovo's hidden partition
I've started the Ubuntu installer, went to the partitioning tool and wish to split that XP partition into smaller ones, notably making a separate one for Ubuntu.

Will splitting that XP partition wipe out all the data (and hence erase XP)??

 

You can't split it, you can shrink it, and then create partitions from the free space, but you can't spread xP across multiple partitions.

 

Oh, no, I don't want to spread XP [Although I do want a second, separate XP installation later, but that's a different story.]

But if I shrink this XP partition, isn't there a risk of destroying some of its content... 'cuz some of the space will be 'stolen' for the new partition? You know, files don't always gather at the beginning of a partition. I just run a defragmenter and I could see in the visualization of the disk space that there's a tiny bit of data somewhere around 2/5 of the "lenght" of the partition. And the darn defragmenter wouldn't move it. So I'm worried sth will stop to work if it's lost...

But thanks for your answer!!!

 

There could be, make sure to use a good defragmener like Auslogic before you shrink the XP partition.

 

I've done this a million times without losing any data. It should work assuming windows is fully functioning. It will have to do a memcheck after shrinking the windows partition but then you should be good to go.

 

I've used Auslogics Disk Defrag, but it doesn't seem to be so good. First, it didn't move this tiny bit of data in the middle of the disk (system files, as Lenovo's defrag says). Moreover, it claimed it's MFT, which clearly isn't true, because it attached that label to a huge portion of existing data - on a newly bought laptop! Incidentally, this seems to reflect the disk sectors where sys files are discovered by Lenovo's defrag, so I assume that's what it really is.

So since no defrag tool wants to move that crap, I'll take the risk of shrinking the partition as it is...

v1k1ng1001, what precisely do you mean by memcheck?

 

OK, resizing with Ubuntu's partitioning tool went fine. Although I didn't like the fact that during the whole resizing process the progress bar was at 0%. I thought it will stay like this forever and I was afraid to interrupt the process (quite rightfully, as it turned out), 'cuz I could get MFT cracked... But it didn't seem to go anywhere. This was really creepy!!! Certainly a place for Ubuntu to improve!

 

it will be fine. done it many times.

 

Defragmenting is very important - the first time I installed Ubuntu, back in the days of Breezy Badger, I tried to repartition without defragmenting and messed up Windows beyond repair. I'd used about 85% of the hard drive while I had just Windows and thought I could just move that stuff off the hard drive and repartition..silly me ;/

 

Back in the days of Knarly Kitten, it would first nuke your harddrive, then have it's way with it. j/k LOL