Hi,
I have a hard,I have made 3 primary partitions on it and an extended
partition which contains a logical partition,I installed windows on the
first primary partition and the second and the third primary partitions
are allocated to the "/boot" and "swap" partitions nad the logical
partition in the extended partition is allocated to the "/(root)" partition,
so I have made a dual-boot system with both linux nad winxp,
I wanted to know that can I partition my hard disk in a way that
my winxp is stored on a logical parrtition of my extended patition?
Thanks.

Yep But you will most likely have to run grub again after installing WinXP.

All versions of windows need a primary partition to work. While linux can work from extended partitions as well. In short it's not possible.

My site Veera's

sorry to be a pain, afaik it is, I have done it before :/

Well, maybe you'd better explain how you did it.
I also believe this is not possible. I have heard that it is possible to install over a network to a logical partition, but it is unbootable.
Maybe you had a small primary boot partition, and a large logical for the rest of Windows.

I once ran Gentoo on a Toshiba laptop I had, the laptop only had a 40GB HDD, so I had a / , swap and /home partition, these were all primary partitions. I had a spare logical partition at the end so I installed Windows. All I had to do when I was done was chroot and redo grub :/

Sorry - seems you're right. Just had a look at the M$oft knowledgebase
I'll see if I can find a rock to crawl under...

Np :P Btw, I have an MCSE as well ;-)

I would have said the same thing so don't feel too bad.
Out of curiosity does anyone know when this became possible. I'm 'almost' positive that you couldn't always do this.

As far as I know only from Windows 2000 and later.

Were you able to chainload windows after that??!!!
How did you manage to install windows? You installed windows on a logical partition or you later changed the windows partition to logical and could successfully chainload?

yes.

If that "Yes" is for both of my questions!
You're probably lying

/dev/hda1 = /
/dev/hda2 = swap
/dev/hda3 = /home
/dev/hda5 = windows xp

afaik, grub.conf looked like this:

<snip>
title Windows XP
root (hd0,4)
chainloader +1
rootnoverify
</snip>

thank you every one for your answers,what does chainloading mean?