Dual boot with XP

From The Linux Mint Wiki

Maybe it's no big deal for some of us, but others may feel that they need some advice.

Here is a link to a guide (taken from the forums) compiled by Shane Joe.

Warning - There can be only four primary partitions on your hard disk. If you exceed that number, one of them is needed to create an extended partition to put your logical partitions in. If you have to use an existing primary partition to create the extended partition you loose all data in that partition. You may be able to copy what's in there (temporarily) to other partitions, but this has to be done from within Windows before you proceed to install.

Read the section about partitioning if you come fresh from Windows.

But the basics are as follows:

In Linux you create several partitions, at least swap, root and home (for your stuff), and as suggested a partition for your profiles.

You should create a small partition for your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles so you can share them between XP and Mint.

Do not give permission for XP to write to Mint if you want to be secure from a virus attack in Windows (your profiles folder excluded)