I have a dual booting system with fc4 and xp. I installed fc4 after xp and everything work fine. Now many months have passed and as you know windows gets pretty dirty, slow problematic if used a lot (I installed thousands of programs and did lots of stuff... I used to reinstall it every 6 months)

The problem is that I fear that fc4 will die if I try to reinstall my xp! I mean, I've heard there are lots of problems with the booting because of windows erasing everything...

I'm a newbie, so I didn't understand much of the posts I found here. I'd just need some simple guides (howtos) to make this thing work.

Hope you'll be able to help!

bye

No, Windows isn't "erasing everything". Most probably it will write over your bootloader, especially if it's in MBR, but reinstalling the Linux bootloader (be it grub, lilo or something else) helps most of the time. A good idea is to copy your bootloader configuration to a safe place before the reinstallation, so afterwards you can just copy it back and don't have to re-write it all over again.

Just don't let your Windows format the whole disk. Perhaps you should format some partition for it, or create free space and let it format that. But in no case let it format the whole disk.

thanks, can you point me to an how to or a guide about reinstalling the bot loader (I think mine is grub..)thanks

bye

I'm also interested by that topic for the same reason, my dual-boot windowsXP gets more and more BSODs with time, and reinstallation is drawing near.
Basically, how can we know where Lilo/grub is installed (if that's necessary, though), not the /etc/ files but the bootloader itself, if we need to reinstall them ? And, how can we simply reinstall them ? o_O

You reinstall MS Windows XP, and it screws up the MBR. Then, you boot the fedora CD/DVD, and choose the rescue option:

boot: rescue

and reinstall grub in the MBR. Then everything works again.

Simple as that ?
Great, thanks, AwMachine ^_^