[Richard Kimball]

Good advice. I haven't done a disk partition since back in my Windows days, but IIRC, partitioning meant "BACK UP EVERYTHING AND DO A CLEAN INSTALL!!!!!" Lots of surprises can happen when partitioning a disk. OTOH, if he's going to do a clean install, is there any reason not to partition and reinstall Windows, if he thinks he might want to use it? It might also be easier to install XP first, since he's more familiar with it, let it do the partition, and then install Ubuntu.

This suggestion is made by a guy that knows nothing about Linux, flame away at will, Gridley.

[ThePythonicCow]

partitioning meant "BACK UP EVERYTHING AND DO A CLEAN INSTALL!!!!!"

Not necessarily. There are several tools and packages available that will shrink, expand and move about disk partitions, without data loss (unless the Gods are aligned against you.)

The market leader is Symantec's Partition Magic (formerly a Powerquest product, before Symantec bought them out.) My favorite is either of 7Tools Partition Manager (it looks like a Partition Magic knock off, but underneath the covers, it is more solid) or GNU's parted.

Typical installers for major distributions, likely including Ubuntu (though I don't know for sure) include a variation of parted that you can bring up during the install, if you choose the Advanced Partitioning or some such option at the point it comes to decide where to lay down the installation on your disk(s).