since I will be doing an internship for which i need to use Windows software, I have decided to ruin my day trying to remove my Ubuntu 12.04, install Win XP SP3 (since the DualBoot theme from ubuntu suggests to first install Windows and then Ubuntu, for problems with the bootloader if you do it the other way around) and then reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 since I would like to keep using it as my primary operating system, using WinXP exclusively for the internship. Other than that, I would like to have a partition for the data, which can be used by both Ubuntu and Windows.

So now,

1. I have used the disk utility run from an ubuntu-live cd to format my drive with Master Boot Record (being conscious of the fact that this way I will lose all my data, which I have saved on an external drive before, and that my Ubuntu won't work anymore afterwards), creating partitions for

   • Windows (NTFS),
   • personal data (FAT, since as far as I know both Ubuntu and Windows can deal with this),
   • a Swap partition for Linux,
   • and one partition for Ubuntu (ext4);

2. trying to install Win XP from cd gives me a blue screen, which stops the setup and telling me to remove all recently installed drives and to run CHKDSK.

So I thought, that maybe Windows doesn't like pre-partitioned drives for its installation and thus I need to re-format my hard drive in order to have a completely "new" drive, which I can then, during the Windows-installation, partition in order to create the partitions I need. Trying to do this, though, the disk-utility run from the live-CD gives me this warning:

Error creating partition table: helper exited with exit code 1: In part_create_partition_table: device_file=/dev/sda, scheme=0 got it got disk committed to disk BLKRRPART ioctl failed for /dev/sda: Device or resource busy

I do not understand why it tells me that the hard-drive is busy, because, as stated above, I am doing all this from a live-CD.

Thus, my questions are:

How can I resolve the error given by the disk utility?

Does it make sense to use four partitions in the way mentioned above? And if not so, which partitions should I create?

Can I, theoretically, partition my drive from an Ubuntu live-cd in order to create the partitions I want and to install first Windows and then Ubuntu?

Thanks for any help, David