thanks for the feedback mr. rickenbacherus.

Resist the temptation to overwrite xp with Linux, then create the following partition table. This is just an example but tne sizes should work just fine. They don't need to be exact.

/dev/hda1 primary NTFS wnixp 5G
/dev/hda2 primary linux swap 500MB
/dev/hda3 primary linux 3G
/dev/hda4 extended
/dev/hda5 logical linux 4G
What does "extended" mean for the /dev/hda4 partition? It looks like you described the suggested size for the other partitions but for the /dev/hda4 partition you've written "extended".