Hello all,

I am new to this forum and linux as well and am very excited about getting into it. I have been doing lots of reading about linux and how to get it up and running and have come across a question. I read about the different distros and decided that I would try Suse 10.1 on my toshiba laptop. I downloaded the 5 iso's and burned them as images and they are ready to go. Using qtparted in knoppix I shrunk my XP partition to 25 GB (as this will be a dual boot system for the time being) leaving the rest (after the XP partition) as free space for the linux partitions and fat32 (for file sharing between OS's).

I am about to start the Suse installation and have been reading about where to place GRUB and it has been confusing to me, as I have conflicting stories. Some say to put it in the MBR while others say that windows will not load if the MBR has been changed and that it is necessary to edit the boot.ini file in xp to chainload linux. Can someone please point me in the right direction (a previous post or thread) or comment on what to do? I have tried searching but find different stories each time.

Thanks in advance

Windows will boot when grub is installed in mbr. Many distros add it to /boot/grub/menu.lst file automatically on installation, if not it's simple to edit manually http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html . Easy to replace grub if things go amiss with your xp disk and booting into rescue console and fixmbr command.

Edit: Also far easier than messing about with boot.ini