a disk read error occurred

Let me stick my oar in one more time on this topic. I strongly recommend you run DBAN (Darick's Boot and Nuke) against this drive. Let it write 0s to the first 5% or so of the drive (first track is all that is required but it never hurts to be cautious). That will make the drive appear to XP or Ubuntu as RAW, unformatted. Now install XP and partition the drive into to 125GB (or so) partitions. Format the first one then install XP there. I'm pretty sure that will resolve the problem.

The /boot partition, as it turns out, is a way to avoid the BIOS 137 GB limit for a Linux system, by forcing the kernel to reside at the beginning of the disk. Check out this section of the GRUB page:

How to make a separate /boot partition

It seems reasonable that if I structure my partitions correctly, I can get a working dual-boot of XP and Ubuntu that can access the whole drive (as long as I limit my XP partition to around 100 GB).

I imagine it will look something like:

/boot [100 MB]
Windows XP [100 GB]
Ubuntu [140 GB]
Swap [2 GB]

I'm going to do lots of homework and give this a try and see what comes of it. In the mood for a little adventure.

I'm curious too so please let us know how you make out.

Yes, definitely let us know. I haven't had enough experience trying to bypass the 137Gb restriction to really offer any advice. Sounds interesting if it works though.

I'll let you know…

I did it. The 250 GB hdd is now available at full capacity. Following the excellent guide here (along with doing lots of other homework on partitions and the various BIOS disk limits) I was able to reinstall Windows XP, repartition the disk and make a /boot partition that contains GRUB and my Linux kernel (both GRUB and the Linux kernel are capable of addressing the entire drive, provided that the BIOS can find them). So my 250 GB hdd now looks like:

1 GB-/boot partition
100 GB-Windows XP partition
19 GB-Shared data partition
2.5 GB-Linux Swap area
127 GB-Ubuntu Studio partition

The trick seems to be that the Linux Kernel and Windows XP (along with GRUB and any partition that may be accessed by XP) must reside within the 137 GB limit.

I'll post in this thread if I encounter difficulties (just to be informative).

Thanks again for sharing your insights.

Dave