ok heres the deal i've dual booted vista with ubuntu 8.10 on my acer aspire 5315 (which is annoying with vista and ubuntu but actually fixable on ubuntu)

now my HDD is 80gb iuse 16gb for ubuntu 16gb for D drive in vista and 32gb in vista for C drive
now wot i want to do is install xp over the vista part of my laptop but keeeping certain files eg music, videos, pictures, certain programmes and a huge folder with all sorts of psp homebrew and games i've got kept on my d drive. But i would like to do this keeping my ubuntu partition

btw i hav an install disk for XP and my dad used it on 2 computers once before so i'm assuming i can use it again so can anyone help plz
XD

also my laptop is a s*** laptop because the idiots who made it ACER made it so the internal cooling fan would only run on vista as the driver for it was in the OS but this was resolved on ubuntu with a script (eventually, jus b4 it melted Lol) anyway i was wondering if i would encounter the same problem in XP

If there is a specific driver for the colling, you might want to check that before you install XP. Sounds a bit strange, most likely you'll find a driver for it for XP too. Do some googling on that.

You should copy your files either to D or to the Ubuntu partition. maybe a backup e.g. to a DVD-RW would be an idea. Also good to have an external USB HD for those things.

How do you boot? Which boot manager do you use? Do you have a separate boot partition e.g. with Grub installed?
I think need to set the Windows partition active and bootable with fdisk or cfdisk or similar tool in windows. This would be how you would have it if you only booted windows. Then you install XP on that windows partition. After that you need to use the same fdisk tool to set the boot with grub active again (if that was how your setup was).

Be careful so that you don't let windows reformat your linux partition and backup would be good....

Mons

Hi there,

I believe you will run into some problems, since installing Windows overrides the grub file. Therefore, in my knowledge, if you want to override the vista installation, you will need to reinstall windows and Linux.

I hope that someone can prove me wrong.

Cheers

Installing xp on a machine with Ubuntu and vista will make both unbootable as xp will overwrite the mbr. This is a simple fix for Ubuntu simply re-installing Grub. The problem is that vista will not be bootable after installing xp as vista uses a different bootloader. The site below explains some of the problems and claims to have some solutions.

http://vista.blorge.com/2008/01/03/h...ot-the-system/

Haven't tried this so I don't know how successful it will be?

ok now would this work backup up media files to memory stick uninstall vista by formatting other partitions in gparted on ubuntu then install XP avoiding linux partition then when all installed properly (hopefully) use the ubuntu live CD to reactivate grub is tht wot u were sorta hinting at??