Partitioning as per your suggestion is wise. Any of those 3 partitions can be either primary or secondary, it doesn't matter. If you think you may need more partitioning tricks later, leave a primary space free. The extended will also take up one of the four spaces.
Put the boot loader into the MBR and you won't have trouble. In your case (XP + warranty), back up your MBR with dd count=1 </dev/sda >file yourself before messing with boot loaders, and you have one more thing to go back to. Putting the boot loader into a root filesystem secondary didn't work for me in many cases. Whether this was because I use RAID1 for /home and / (I never use a /boot, and yes I boot from RAID1 and it just works), or whether the installer was broken, or whether grub was broken, or whether grub supports this only for some cases and my installer didn't bother to check, I don't know, but I got sufficiently fed up that I thought stuff it......into the MBR and be done. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
