The recent GROKLAW article about how Windows contacts Bill Gates every time I boot was the final straw. I'm going to remove it completely from my primary PC.

Currently, that setup includes WinXP on hda and Debian AMD64 on hdb. I want to format hda and install the 32 bit Debian there. Unfortunately, the 64-bit version, while nice when it works, is still not quite suitable for a primary OS. I want to keep the AMD64 installation intact, tho. My dual-boot system will then be Debian 32 & Debian 64.

I know that when I format, I'll lose Grub. My question is, will the Debian installer automatically rewrite Grub to pick up the new configuration?

Always before when I've installed, the existing OS it needed to find was on the master hard drive, and the new installation on the slave. Now that will be switched around ... the new installation on the master and the one I want Grub to detect, on the slave. Is there any chance that could be a problem?

The installer tends to go out of its way to detect other OS and incorporate them into menu.lst. It’s actually quite annoying when you have several OS installed, say in raid1 setups.

And it’s a lot easier to pass the boot to different OS by using “chainloader +1" instead of configuring (and reconfiguring) menu.lst for each (new) kernel in the other OS (although you can also configure to boot the newest kernel fairly easily through the links in /).

If you are concerned about grub not booting the new installation, then make a grub boot floppy (or grub boot USB flash drive) before you start: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...UB-boot-floppy

That way, no matter what goes wrong with the grub setup, you will be able to easily boot the system the first time.

This is almost sickening. I wouldn't mind never using a microsoft OS again (that's right, they don't even deserve to have their name capitalized). Thanks for the link, I'll be passing it around.

~Justin