install on eee 1000h

[G.]

A friend with a somewhat older eee 1000h on it would like me to
install ubuntu for her (will probably go with lubuntu as it works well
off the usb and a regular install would probably be a bit much for
this machine).

However there are already 4 partitions on this machine.  One has only
39 megabytes on it.  Gparted lists it as a unknown type.  Since she
needs to keep XP on here, how can I tell if deleting that partition
will do harm?  Not found an answer by googling for it at least not so
far.

Thanks

garyk