I have windowsXP installed. I partition my hard drive into logical drives of 10gig. I then delete a logical drive and then I installed Fedora Core 4. I auto partitioning. use the free space. at the end it will write the boot sector and when grub comes up for the re boot you will have to choose to boot windows or fedora.
during the install you would also have an option to choose to name windowsXP and also to edit the process and at that time set windows if you wanted to to be the default boot.
It works real good.
In Mandriva 2005LE you have an option to select FB0 as the boot drive and it will write out a diskette to be used for booting.
if you leave the diskette out then it will boot windowsXP
Yes I have wiped out windows or really the MBR and in some cases could not recover anything.
but if you are carefull it works well

Larry

If you just wipe out the MBR, Linux is still there. You just need to reinstall the bootloader. I think Redhat and Mandrake have a rescue thing that will do that. With Gentoo, we boot the Gentoo CD and chroot in and reinstall it there.

Removing the MBR record does not delete Linux, just the bootloader. The partitions with the OS are still there, you just can't see them. Yup, I have done this once.

Later