Ubuntu – dual boot on Medio/Aldi mini laptop

I bought a mini laptop from Aldi, the E1210. It’s only 1.2 Kg, 1.6 GHz, 1 Gb ram, 80 GB HD. It has windows XP home which works very well, but I need Ubuntu. I wanted to keep the install of XP so here is how I did it. There is no CD so I used USB drives.

1. On my main laptop running Ubuntu I used UNetbootin to create a Parted Magic usb stick
2. On the Medion I booted from the USB disk and used the UI QParted to resize the XP disk to be 40 GB. For some reason I had to do the partitioning this way as the Ubuntu installer would not allow me to resize the exisiting 80 GB partition.
3. Then I rebooted into XP and formated the unused space as a fat32 drive
4. Then I used UNetbootin to create a Ubuntu 8.01 USB disk.
5. I booted the Medion using the Ubuntu disk.
6. I ran the install and when the partition choice came up the empty drive (SDA2) was pre selected.
7. The install went fine and then I had a dual boot with no CD used.