Yesterday was a long day filled mosting with testing applicaions for work. Not what I had envisioned for a Saturday but time is a premium these days. So what does that have to do with dual booting…. well a few weeks ago two of the three DIMM slots on the desktop I use for work went bad which cut the memory to 256mb. To be more efficient I loaded XP on a spare laptop drive and started using it. Yesterday for some reason I got tired of swaping out the drives, as this is my personal laptop that runs Ubuntu, and decided I should just setup a dual boot system if I’m not going to replace the desktop any time soon. So I did and it was easier than I thought.

A quick google pointed me to an endless number of posts on how to set up a dual boot system. What was a little different for my situation was I wanted to put XP on the drive Ubuntu was already on and I didn’t want to reload XP but copy the partition. Wouldn’t you know on the first page of my search results pointed me to this post which was exactly what I was looking for. The key would be resizing and moving the partitions, the artical suggested using GParted which turned out to be the perfect tool. In the past I have not had much need for using a partition manager so doing this type of process was a little new.

Moving and resizing partitions on the 60GB drive Ubuntu was on was the first order of business so I downloaded and burned the GParted Live CD. I put the CD in the drive and booted, following the instructions, and I was in business. Making space was nothing more than dragging the mouse on a bar graph to set the new size of an existing partion, making room for Windows. So were /home on Ubuntu was 40GB it’s now 20, with the other 20 being for XP. Setting the new partition to be ntfs was just a couple clicks. The article commented about creating one formatted as FAT32, for sharing data, but for me that is all on a usb drive and not necessary. Once that was done copying the (c:\) partition from the Windows drive, connected to the laptop via usb, was a simple as copy and paste, All that took about 5 minutes of clicks and checks and 15 minutes of the application working, and me waiting.

So far with a total of about 20 – 30 minutes worth of work it came down to booting both partitions. The Ubuntu partition loaded as usual, Grub was not changed so their was really no reason that would be a problem. The trick would be to get XP to boot. First would be to fix boot.ini on the XP partition so it knew where the OS was on the new drive, that’s where using the XP CD to “Repair” an installation would fix the problem. This page on Microsofts support site told me everything I needed. Including pointing me to how to fix the boot.ini. All in all my total time was about 45 minutes, needless to say I am pleased.

Kudos to James Bannan and APCMag for posting an excellent article. The pics were a great reference and even though I didn’t follow it to a T it was just what I needed to get the job done.