Mark Shust

Let’s say you have your dream machine setup on the most recent version of Ubuntu, and have already spent hours upon hours setting it up. You’ve installed Zend Studio, Putty, Photoshop, Open Office, yada yada yada. You think you’re done for good with that dreaded bi-monthly re-format of Windows XP/Vista.

But just when you think all is fine and dandy, you find a piece of software that just refuses to run on Wine or Virtualbox (just when you think that isn’t possible… just picture the need to connect to a Windows app, that uses a legacy serial port that has no Ubuntu driver — so it never gets detected by vmware or virtualbox). Yes, there are some rare needs for a native Windows XP install.

I recently had to go through this process and came across two great write-ups. The first step is to add on the necessary hard drive partitions and formats alongside your ubuntu install. You can either do this with a GParted Live CD or the native Ubuntu Live CD. Then, all there is to do is to install Windows, then modify the master boot record for it to respond to Grub once again.

These documents should help you out greatly:

How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (with Linux installed first)

How to Install WinXP after Ubuntu with Gparted