1. Backup Drivers

Using “Revobuild”, take a backup of the drivers on the recovery partition – they are copied to a USB stick. Might come in useful later!

2. Partitioning

Here is how I partitioned the 160GB hard drive (Using “GParted Live” on a USB stick) : -

• Partition 1: Windows 7 – NTFS (20gb)
• Partition 2: Ubuntu – ext3 9.04 (10gb)
• Partition 3: Data – NTFS (FAT32 has 4gb File size limit, linux partitions aren’t easy to access from Windows) ( ~127gb)
• Partition 4: Linux Swap (3gb – swap partition’s size should be at least as large as physical RAM for hibernation)

3. Install Windows 7 OS

Here are some instructions on how to install Windows 7 via a USB flash drive instead of an optical drive (thumb drive has to be at least 4GB).

4. Install Drivers

The most recent Nforce drivers (GPU/SMU/Sata/Ethernet) can be found here. This includes the graphics card driver (GeForce v185.85)

I’ve not tried HDMI yet, but you may also have to install “nVidia HDAudio HDMI Audio” which was saved from the Recovery Partition earlier.

5. Install Latest Graphics Driver

The nVidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 186.18 for Windows 7 was released on 18-Jun-09 so install it from here.

6. Configure Auto-Logon

As this is going to be used as a media centre, I want to skip the initial logon screen.

Press Windows R to bring up the “Run” dialog. Type “control userpasswords2″ and press enter – the “User Accounts” screen will be shown.

Select the user account in the main table and uncheck “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”. Press “Apply” button – the “Automatically Log On” window will be displayed. Enter the password and confirm it to add the password to the system so that it does not need to be entered during logon.

That’s it!