Ok, I think my first mistake was not coming here and posting for more info. I have my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop that I want to boot both Windows XP and Ubuntu so I can play around with the Linux system and start looking into that for a server some day in the far far away future.
Well here's what I have so far:
4 partitions, What was suggested in the Ubuntu forums.
C: is Windows XP formatted NTFS this one is 20gig
D: will be the main drive for Ubuntu, I set the size to I believe I set this at 6gig
E: will be the swap partition, this one is set to 1 or 2 gig I think.
F: FAT32 formatted for sharing files between the two. mostly music and movies. this one is at 10gig
Now I already formatted and installed Windows XP onto the C:. F: is formatted in FAT32 to share file in between.
I pulled the CD Burner from my desktop and placed my DVDROM in there and only have 1 IDE connection on the MB so I can't burn a boot disk. I read through the instructions on the forums to setup and boot from a USB Stick but for some reason my laptop doesn't see the boot files on the USB it goes right over and boots from the C:.
I call out to the Linux Masters of the site and enlighten me on how to proceed.