First, BACK UP THE DATA
Second...I know this isn't exactly what you wanted, but if you want Linux installed with Windows intact for your partitions, have you looked at Wubi? It installed Ubuntu into a file that resides inside the Windows filesystem, so you wouldn't have to worry so much about partitioning. It's a full Linux install too, no emulation.
Third, if you want to alter partitions a bit to resize or delete them, try booting Rescue Is Possible (a liveboot Linux rescue disc) with X and use gparted to alter partitions. Whenever you edit partitions, though, you run the risk of losing data! So make sure you have a backup.
Personally I think you could probably get away with having two partitions added to the notebook, a / and a swap, on top of your reserved partition and Windows partition. The /boot and / partitions are there traditionally for rescue purposes or if you overflow your storage capabilities; you should be able to boot with a rescue disk and mount the /boot partition to get to some basic state of functionality.
Another possibility is to research going with a swap file instead of a swap partition.
My advice would first be to look at Wubi which has the least chance of damaging your data, then think about not using a separate data and /boot partition (just a swap and data), then think long and hard about playing with partition schemes, in that order.
Hope that helps!
I was just typing out something similar and you beat me to it :). – dagorym – 2009-07-21T14:27:10.277
I had similar thoughts... Got GParted LIveCD, read the manual (partitioning part of it), created /boot as primary... Only I thought I would create the rest of the partitions without creating LVM - directly in the extended partition. Is this wrong? And another thing just to make sure my understanding is correct: in your setup the D: partition and free space would be a part of the extended partition, right? – None – 2009-07-21T16:39:01.967
D: and free space in the Extended, yes.
The main benefit to LVM rather than direct extended partitions (which would also work just fine) is that you have the free space available to allocate to other things (separate LV's for virtual machines, or a separate storage LV for video files that you can grow as needed, etc). Typically, it's much much easier to grow your available storage space as needed than to reduce when you discover you really need that free space on the root partition for something else. – Ophidian – 2009-07-21T18:17:15.747