After using Gparted
 

I launched to Live CD of Ubuntu and used the Gparted utility that came with the Live CD of Ubuntu. I resized my second partition of my signle HDD and reduced the size by 20GB. After it was completed with running Gparted, I rebooted into Windows XP Pro. Now my second partitioned is resized by 20GB.

My question:

Where did the 20 GB go? I thought I would be able to see a 20GB partition in order to install Ubuntu.

PLEASE EXPLAIN?
Am I missing a step?

You won't see the partition under windows unless you formatted it as Fat32 or NTFS before rebooting. Windows doesn't see blank space.

If you do want to see it, go to Start --> Run and enter diskmgmt.msc. This should show the free space at the end of the drive.

But when you boot your linux install, you'll see it as free space at the end of the drive from the linux installer...

Can I format that empty space within Ubuntu Live CD so Windows will see it?

Yes. You just have to use FAT32 or NTFS. Windows won't see it if it's a linux filesystem. Or you should be able to just use the XP disk management to format it as Fat32 or NTFS, then you don't have to reboot...

Just realize you can't install linux on Fat32 or NTFS. If you want to share files between linux and windows, create a shared FAT32 partition since both linux and windows can read and write FAT32.

Can Gparted be used to simply partition Windows XP Pro HDD to create another partition?
And I don't plan I setting up my system in order to share files. I simply want to try the full install of Ubuntu as a regular OS that can run on its own.

Thanks for the help.

Yes. You can resize, shrink, grow, delete, or create new partitions. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php

Or if you already created free space, you can just tell the ubuntu installer to "Install to free space at end of drive" and it should do it for you. You don't have to create the partition ahead of time...