Dual booting Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) and Windows Vista

Smooth and easy way (obviously apply common sense where ever necessary):

• Make your Vista recovery disks and take backup of all important files before proceeding.
• Install Vista first. Don't waste your time trying to partition your system using the utilities provided in Vista - Disk Manager and the Defrag utility. They just don't cut it. I was not able to shrink the Vista partition to my desired 30 Gigs. Wasted quite some time trying to delete/move system files so that a defrag could move them to the beginning of the partition. Instead try GParted (the next step)
• Boot from the Ubuntu CD. Use GParted (System > Administration > GNOME Partition Editor). Yes, it recognizes NTFS and it did an excellent job resizing my Vista partition. After resizing restart the system and boot into Vista. Make sure to let Checkdisk run during boot. Verify your Vista installation is okay.
• Boot from the Ubuntu CD again and this time you click on install. When asked for partitioning choose to manually partition your drive. Ubuntu rightly recognizes the service and the Vista partitions and makes suitable entries in the /boot/grub/menu.lst. (I just edited the label for the /dev/sda1 - the service partition). These are the entries in the menu.lst on my system
  
  # This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
  # on /dev/sda2
  title Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)
  root (hd0,1)
  savedefault
  makeactive
  chainloader +1
  
  # This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
  # on /dev/sda1
  title Lenovo Recovery Partition (loader)
  root (hd0,0)
  savedefault
  makeactive
  chainloader +1
  
• Install Ubuntu following the instructions.
• Reboot - You will automagically see the options to boot into the various partitions during startup. Only caveat the thinkvantage button no longer works during startup. And yes if you choose the Recovery partition to boot it does start the recovery program