I have a hard drive which has a Primary partition ( WinMe ) and Extended Partition with four Logical Drives. XP being on one of them. I have about 18G freespace and was wondering if I could create ...

When you create "Logical Partitions" within the "Extended Partition", Linux (and GRUB) start naming them after the four reserved names.

A SATA drive will only let you have a maximum of four partitions for example, and you will also need to create a small swap partition. When you come to install a Linux distro, make sure you select ...

Pro & Cons of Creating Logical Volumes in Linux. Logical volumes are an alternate method of partitioning hard drive space. The capability has been built into the Linux kernel since 1999 ...

I could use diskutil to shrink the partition and then create a new partition, and copy the iso image (via dd) into that partition, and then boot Linux from the internal HD and do the upgrade.

This will create a backup of your VM in case something goes wrong. After all, editing drive partitions can be very dangerous if something goes wrong.