Hey,

I wanted to practice setting a dual boot system, so I screwed around with my old Pentium 3, 450 mhz, 128 MB ram, so I set up WinXP and SuSE 10.1 for Dual Boot. Everything worked great, I set up all of the partitions in Windows, and the dual boot worked fine. WinXP is (surprising) speedy, but SuSE is pretty slow, which I expected. I'd like to try wiping out SuSE and installing one of the lighter weight distro's, like Xubuntu, but don't want to risk screwing up my dual boot. I (think I) can wipe out the partitions easily enough, and install Xubuntu, what worries me is keeping GRUB working properly. And advice?

Thanks!

Whatever the new bootloader is, should take care of it for you.

Grub should be installed on the MBR, so it shouldn't really be phased by wiping out your linux partition. Once you get your new distro up and running (or maybe during the install, never tried Xubuntu) you should be able to modify grub.conf to point it in the right direction. Also, grub is pretty robust in that you can modify your boot options on the fly from the bootloader menu (by pressing 'e,' if i recall).

I have done this many time recently. I went from Zenwalk, to Ubuntu, to Debian currently. None of them blew up my XP installation. I have even went from Lilo to grub back to lilo back to grub without any problems.