Dual (Trio?) Boot XP, WS 2008, Ubuntu
 

Hello everyone =)

So I have two physical hard drives, identical Seagate SATA 3.0Gbps 250GB hard drives. Here is my current configuration, as seen in XP's Disk Management:

Disk 0
C: 97.65 GB NTFS (XP boots from here)
D: 111.94 GB NTFS (I use it to store things)
23.29 GB (I think RestoreIT uses this, but I will likely get rid of it soon: with an external hard drive, RestoreIT seems a bit unnecessary)

Disk 1

2.01 GB Unformatted
20.00 GB ext2/3
20.00 GB ext2/3
20.00 GB ext2/3
170.87 GB ext2/3

The partitions on Disk 0 and the first two on Disk 1 are Primary; the last three on Disk 1 are logical drives that comprise one extended partition. Three years ago I installed a copy of openSUSE on it, but never used it at all. There's nothing on it that I would need to keep.

So here's what I would like to do. I have a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop 64-bit (I'm running Core 2 Duo), and from Microsoft DreamSpark I can get a copy of Windows Server 2008 Standard for free legally. I'd like to split Disk 1 between Ubuntu and WS2008 (maybe 120GB each?), leave Disk 0 as it is now for my existing XP installation, and be able to boot between these three at startup.

I've looked around at dual booting just two of these OS's, but haven't yet found anything with all three of them. Like I mentioned, I've booted into openSUSE maybe once or twice. I've run a Ubuntu Live CD, and liked it (and I hear it's, relatively speaking, very user friendly).

Also, any recommendations as to KDE vs. Gnome? I tend to get lost in the (long) articles comparing them.

One more thing: I might be upgrading my hard drives soon to a single 1TB drive. Will all these partitions be able to move to a new drive together if I clone the images?

So if anyone could point me in the right direction in configuring all this, I would be very thankful :)

Partition Disk1 like you want and install WS2008 first. WS2008 will detect your current Winxp installation on Disk0 and create a boot menu from which you can choose to either boot WS2008 or Winxp. Then install ubuntu on the other Disk1 partition. Ubuntu will detect the WS2008 bootloader and set up a boot entry for it in grub. When you select that entry, grub will chain load the windows bootloader and you can then select to boot either WS2008 or WinXP from there. The process should be fairly painless if you install in the right order.

Ubuntu is a gnome centric distro and I would not recommend trying the kde version of ubuntu, kubuntu, as it's generally regarded as a less than ideal implementation of kde. If you want to try kde, you might want to take a look at mandriva.

Okay, it seems simple enough :) With this kind of configuration, will it be possible to set WinXP to boot automatically if I don't do anything? (For example, Grub loads the WS2008 bootloader in 5 seconds, which loads WinXP in 5 seconds.)

In regards to Gnome and KDE, from doing a bit more reading, it seems both will be new and require getting used to...so I guess I might as well try Gnome.

Also, I read somewhere that Ubuntu can read NTFS as well. Preferably, I could grab the files from different partitions. Should I have the Ubuntu installer format it as NTFS so that everybody can read everybody else?

Why not virtual?
 

I would boot to ubuntu, then have an xp and a 2008 server virtual machine using virtualbox, that way you can be in all three at the same time.

But that's just me :-D

Yes - easy.No, don't (attempt to) do that - I've never tried, but I doubt you can install Ubuntu natively into a NTFS partition. Nor would you want to.
Create a separate (NTFS) data partition, that all systems can update - much safer. Doesn't expose any of your systems to unnecessary risks.

So maybe something like 20 GB for the Ubuntu partition, and the rest in an NTFS partition? Ubuntu can read the Windows partitions too right?

That should work fine. Ubuntu ships a toolset that allows full read/write for NTFS.
I'd suggest (in Ubuntu) you mount the Windoze system partitions as read-only, and the data partition as rw. Windoze will ignore your native Ubuntu partition(s).