will Ubuntu screw with my recovery partition?

[gusl]

I am somewhat worried that the Ubuntu installer will either overwrite my WinXP Recovery partition (provided by HP), or put its own bootloader before one gets a chance to hit F11, preventing access to the Recovery Partition. My goal is to triple-boot: frequently boot into (1) Ubuntu and (2) WinXP, and very infrequently into (3) Recovery Partition.

Some claim that F11 is a BIOS feature, and thus safe. Others say that *not* deleting the Recovery Partition can cause boot problems.

Running cfdisk from the Live CD, I see that I have two partitions:
* sda1: NTFS, ~72.5GB
* sda2: W95 FAT32 (LBA), ~7.5GB

I think sda2 is the recovery partition; I find it a bit surprising that it's FAT.

UPDATE: This is exactly what I'm asking for, except that I have an HP, not an Acer. 'meierfra' suggests adding Ubuntu to the Windows bootloader.
Alternatively, 'pumalite' suggests installing grub to the partition, rather than to the MBR, and booting with SuperGrub. (This sounds annoying; imagine going through 2 boot screens every time you restart your machine) But none of this should be necessary if the "F11 Restore" is a BIOS feature, as some people claimed.

Comments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I bought my laptop used, and when I try this, I get:

<< A set of recovery discs has been created for this PC. Only one set
is allowed per PC. >>

In case I lose the Recovery Partition, I would need install discs for WinXP Tablet Edition. Also, I am no longer at CMU.

[dachte.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, it's very easy to trick the recovery disk making program - if you look in the right place, you can find the ISOs it makes, and when they're complete (while the disk is burning), you can copy them to another file. The program normally deletes the ISOs afterwards and refuses to make them again though, so this advice may be a bit late.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

yup. Too late!

I've emailed the guy who sold me the laptop.