I plan to install Fedora Core 5 on my laptop which already contains Windows.

I am afraid that during the install something may go wrong and I will not be able to boot into Windows XP if the Fedora install crashes (I've seen it happen on a Desktop PC).

Does the Rescue disk allow for booting into Windows?

If not, is there anyway to boot Windows by installing GRUB only?

Thanks

If you have a Windows Installation disk (not the same as a rescue disk) you can "fix" the MBR to allow you to boot to Win.

If you install Lilo or Grub in the MBR you can also boot Win. You can fix this with a Linunx live CD like Kanotix, Slax, and many others.

There are other options but this is enough to get around any problem.

you can always use knoppix or any other rescue/live cd (maybe even the install cds) to boot into linux
and use the command "mbr" to restore the default mbr, this should remove lilo, grub or whatever and windows will boot again.

Windows usualy installs its bootloader in the MBR. Sometimes it happened to me that on a reinstall it would install the bootloader in another primary partition ( in fact that was the reason so now I only use a primary partition setup and the rest in the extended one).
So here is how I did it when I was dual-booting:
Windows was to be installed first onto a primary partition at the begining of the hard drive.
The rest of the hard drive is taken up by the extended partition.
In the extended partition I would have a FAT32 for use by both systems and the rest for use by linux(swap, boot partition, root partition and home partition(optional)).
The linux boot loader was to be installed in the linux boot partition(32MB) in the extended partition and not in the MBR because it would replace the windows boot loader.
You might ask "So what?" but in fact to boot Windows, grub chain loads the windows boot loader, meaning it does a few optional and some required tricks and passes the control to the windows boot loader.
Then the boot partition is made active.
You edit the grub menu with the windows boot partition (the first primary one in my case) and also boot the linux kernel from the linux boot partition(the one with grub ) and tell it the real root partition(the linux root partition in the extended partition).
Then you can easily boot any of the OS's with no fear of ruinning the windows install.
Just my tried and worked, nothing more. :-D

The answer is YES.

Section C of my second link in my signature describes it.

Grub can be installed in a data-only primary partition without a Linux attached. One can ask Windows to make the data-only partition active and so Windows MBR will boot straight into it.

Grub has a "makeactive" command to turn the original Windows partition back to active again whenever required. Grub can then be used to boot any other MS systems, Linux, BSD, Solaris.....

It is prettty cool as Windows MBR is used to boot Grub. Grub is then used to booot all the rest of the systems. A LiveCD is all that is needed to arrange Grub to do such thing.

This is great information saikee. Thanks.