(Note: this is not a proper tip, but was written to share my experience with how I went about installing Pardus 2008.1. I tend to find the hardest way to do things.
So, the best tip I can give you if you want to know how to dual boot with Pardus and XP, is to go to the wiki how-to link that atolboo posted below, which is straight forward and easy to understand. )
"This is my fumbling attempt at a How To.
I recently installed Pardus and I seemed to do everything wrong by messing up grub, fiddling with gparted and Ranish Partition Manager, corrupting ntldr, and misplacing MBR. Many of you will laugh or think, “give a newbie a couple of partition managers, bad idea!”, but just in case this helps anyone.
I had XP Pro installed on a 150 GB hard drive partitioned as NTFS on half of the disk, and wanted to erase the current Linux distro that was on the remaining half and install Pardus 2008.1.
I used a live-boot disk utility called Ultimate Boot CD and in it used Ranish Partition Manager to delete the Linux partitions (which included a swap space) and then proceeded to E (erase) which wrote zeros over the data of that partition. Don't ask me why, but I always do this before installing or re-installing any operating system.
I then clicked S (save MBR ) and F2 (save file to disk), otherwise I would have messed up the master boot record. Booted out of UBCD and restarted system and inserted Pardus 2008.1 Hyaena install disk and booted with CD drive first. Clicked enter which started the boot up process. Be ready to click F2 soon to arrow up to English language, or you will boot up with Turkish language. I did this the first time, but no big deal. I restarted the disk and was ready for it the second time. After going through the preliminary generic questions about default keyboard layout and time zone, I came to the Add User section. I added the first user with administrative rights, and created a second user with no administrative rights. Next screen was password to use for root. Now comes the part where I messed up.
Select the Partitioning Method:
-Automatic. Try to use free space or resize current partitions
-Delete all partitions
-No. I'll partition my disk manually
I selected “Try to use free space...”. With the other distros I have used, like ubuntu, for example, it would use the remaining free space, which would have been the remaining half of the disk's unused, unpartitioned space. But Pardus chose to use the NTFS Windows partition, which was roughly 75 GB. When I clicked next it showed a summary of how it would be installed, showing it would shrink the Windows partition down to about 43 GB and use the remaining space on that partition for Pardus. I thought, huh?
(I think the install would go easier for newbie's to Pardus or first time Linux users if this first selection was more accurate or clearly put. If it says it will try to use free space, it should. I am assuming here that free space is unused, unpartitioned space. I think some term it unallocated space. Pardus did the latter of Automatic and resized the current partition.)
I decided to select this just to see what it would do. I came to the next field, the boot loader choice. I wasn't sure, maybe it was because I wasn't used to the wording, or just wasn't thinking straight, or recently read up on where to install grub and became confused, but instead of selecting
“Install to first bootable disk (recommended)”, I chose the second selection,
worded something like, “install where Pardus is installed at”, and let the install process begin.
And what an install process: beautiful icons to look at of programs that you will have at your fingertips, with a brief description of each program. Nicely done, and wow, what a fast install of 11 minutes. It says it will take about 30 minutes, depending on your system.
I rebooted after compeletion and, boo-hoo, no Windows showed at grub boot menu, or maybe it was there at grub, but when I clicked on it, it brought me to a black error console, at this point my memory is a bit foggy as I had tried another install and more fiddling and messed it up even more. In the first install, while in Pardus I could see that Windows was there and shrunk down to 43 GB or so. Just like it showed in the summary.
Hey, no problem, as I read up on what I did wrong and was ready to try it again. Others probably know enough about installation that they laugh at my mistakes, but remember, I'm a newbie. I tried again, made more mistakes with using Ranish and was able to fix the system using the Wiki How to Restore Grub for Pardus. I had my system back, but I was ready to try again, for I didn't want to leave my Windows partition resized. I used Ranish Partiton manager to wipe the whole 150 GB disk. You won't need to do this, but I was ready to make a clean install, instead of trying to resize existing partitions and fixing grub and the master boot loader. I'd only installed XP recently, so it wasn't a problem for me.
With pnp disabled in BIOS, I inserted my nLite XP unattended installation disk, but this time resized the NTFS partition to 53 GB as I planned to have another smaller NTFS partition and install Pardus on the remaining unused space. So, let XP do its thing on the 53 GB partition, which allowed me to start a load of laundry, go pick green beans from the garden, give the chickens some food, and sit on the back porch.
With that finally finished, I removed the XP install disk, rebooted, and inserted the Gnome Parted live disk partition utility. It showed in a graph bar that XP was installed on 53 GB as NTFS. Then I clicked on the unused space of the graph bar, which highlited it, and clicked “new” and “resize” and slid the bar to the left to create a partition of about 30 GB as NTFS file system. I wanted to create this middle partition to use for placing movie files as I do a lot of video editing. Clicked “apply” and then rebooted system. Then upon restart of computer, inserted the Pardus install disk. I was much more relaxed as I knew what I was doing this time.
1. Select Partitioning Method:
and this time I selected
“No. I'll partition my disk manually”
(I'll add here that I've never been able to figure out other distro's manual partioning choices. Ubuntu's selection confused me, [where do I put /root or /home?] , and Fedora confused me even more. I was expecting the same, but actually Pardus makes manual partitioning easy, as it tells you what you need, lets you use a slider bar to size it-no figuring out megabytes. Nice job, Pardus team!)
2. Select the disk to apply selected method:
ATA WDC sda (149 GB)
Manual Partitioning shows a graph bar for my setup as
Disk 1 (sda)-149GB (59.0GB Free) with a W icon so I easily knew where XP was installed.
I clicked on the right part of the bar, “Free Space 59.0BG” which highlited the it. Went down to bottom left of screen and under
to use:
“as Pardus System Files (mandatory)” well, we'll need that, won't we.
Since I wanted a swap space, I dragged the slider from the right hand side to the left until I felt it had left me about 8 GB of space. (I read that a rule of thumb for Linux swap space is twice the size of your RAM. ) You can do the math for converting mb to gb if you don't know off hand. I just guessed at how far to slide the bar. “Format” box is automatically ticked. Clicked “apply” and it changed the graph bar section I had highlighted and changed it to a blue colour. And in this section it showed “Partition 5 Pardus will install here 52.0GB” You can hover your cursor over it and it will show more information. If you want to change and start again, click, “Reset all changes”.
This left me with a free space of 8.74 GB which showed in the graph. I clicked on this part, which highlighted it, go to bottom left of page
use space:
“as swap space (optional) “
and I left slider bar alone to use remaining space for swap. “Format” is automatically ticked. Clicked “apply”. Showed highlighted section of swap partition. You can hover cursor over any section of graph and it will show specifications, such as path, size and file system. Clicked “next”.
Bootloader Choice:
This time I selected the first choice, the recommended choice:
“Install to first bootable disk (recommended)”. Clicked “next” and it shows a summary of where all will be installed, such as root and grub, etc. giving you all the information you need before you commit. “Begin Install”. Ah, such a pleasant install experience! The big tick mark saying Pardus was installed successfully. Click “reboot” and the disk ejects (even Fedora 9's live disk doesn't do this properly), the system restarts and I am greeted with a nice grub menu of Pardus or XP, which I am able to boot into both without any problems.
Regards,
Lisa Marie"
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When I panic, I can't think straight. 
