Installing windows XP next to Ubuntu Linux

My netbook, Acer Aspire One, has a partition on it which I can boot through to restore my system to factory defaults. My questions is if there is anyway I can have it restore on to a specific partition of the harddrive & have it bootable along with Ubuntu via Grub.

 

So I netbooted via linux's live cd and 'installed' until I got to the partition configuration utility, where I freed up some space on my linux partition; then I logged into to linux and used gparted to format the new space to NTFS & gave it the label "ACER". Finally I booted via the recovery parition, which initiates a setup that does claim the newly allocated space to be "C:\" and thus the target for restoration. The problem now is before the setup actually begins restoring anything, I get the error message "One of the services DiskPart usses returned a failure. ErrorCode=0, the operation complete successfully."

 

If your computer already has xp on it, you just need to shrink the xp partition with gparted, then reboot to make sure xp is ok, then install ubuntu from your cd/usb and pick the option to manually specify the partitions when it asks you where to install. you pick the unallocated space you created from shrinking xp's partition, as ext4 with the mount point "/" (just a plain slash, its in the dropdown menu when you select the partition and select 'new'), and if you wish add a swap partition.

After installing ubuntu, ubuntu will automatically set up grub for you, with an option to boot ubuntu AND windows (and most likely that recovery partition as well, but be careful as I've had grub ruined just because I accidentally booted in that recovery partition).

I hope this rough sketch of the process is adequate for you.