Resizing Partitions and Dual-Booting

[DeadlyAura]

I have 4 hard drives currently installed with my operating system occupying a good segment of my 250Gb disk. I have Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope installed as my main OS.

The rest of my disks are full of crap, save for an 80Gb disk that is currently empty.

I would like to resize my 250Gb partition to allow for 30Gb to be dedicated to a Windows XP install that I will use for gaming only.

Is there a way for me to safely resize my main partition to allow for this Windows install? Also, can I safely install Windows on this partition without wiping my entire disk?

I'll be using Ubuntu's Grub boot loader to manage my installs.

 

[Digital Cro-Magnon]

I think the cleanest way to install windows XP is to use the 80GB disk, since it is already empty. You could split the 80GB disk into a couple of partitions if you wish, where 30GB is dedicated to XP and the other 50GB could be formatted for storage as NTFS, EXT3, FAT32,.. depending on what OS you want to be able to access it. This way you could point the GRUB boot loader to the 30GB XP partition or, if you mobo supports it, boot directly to that drive via the mobo boot options. It also separates the OS's so you don't accidentally muck up the Ubuntu partition(s).

 

[DeadlyAura]

I ended up installing XP to the 80Gb partition, however, I am unable to boot to it. I have not configured Grub to load it yet, so I have been using the boot menu to boot from the 80Gb drive. It begins to load, and then give the error: "Non-system disk error" or something along those lines.

From there, I can press enter and it will swap back to my 250Gb drive and load Ubuntu just fine.

When I check my drive configuration, it appears as if the 80Gb drive is a slave drive which would lead me to believe that the drive will fail to boot due to the fact that it is a slave drive. I may have a jumper in that drive accidentally that I will try removing later to see if it will help.