I recently had a custom PC built with an Asus motherboard, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, 200 GB HDD, 512 MB Diamond video card etc. all in a well ventilated gamer tower. I have the 500 GB HDD set up to boot with GRUB the following operating systems: Win XP, Linux Mint 3.0 and Ultimate Ubuntu version. I have changed my mind now and I would like to replace the Linux Mint with OpenSuse 11.0. How do I remove Linux Mint and replace it with Open Suse without screwing up the multi-boot system, perhaps losing the custom software installed by the builder and maybe not be able to boot up at all? Thanks - John R.

Are you booting your systems with the Grub from Linux Mint or from Ubuntu? If it's Ubuntu, it should be a lot simpler. I would suggest that you post the output of 'fdisk -l' run as root (or sudo) and also the contents of the /boot/grub/menu.lst file you are using to boot.

You can install some other Linux distro on the partitions holding the distro that you want to get rid of. Be sure to allow installing only on those partition(s). Try to use the same partitioning scheme, if you have separate /, /usr, /var etc partitions.

During installation avoid/skip the step where the GRUB settings are supposed to be written. You then have to adjust your GRUB configuration from the other Linux distro or from a Live-CD by hand to include/adjust the new Linux system. Or boot from the GRUB command-line directly into the newly installed system (you need to read the GRUB manuals before attempting this).

Depending on the distro that you want to install, the installer could have an option to create a new GRUB setup including all the other operating system - this would be the easiest way to deal with the situation (should work for Linuxes, but Windows is always tricky).

Linux Archive

You could use SuSE's root partition as the partition to install the grub boot loader. Then if need be, you can chainload this partition from the grub menu. If you simply copy the SuSE stanza from /boot/grub/menu.lst and paste it into the menu.lst file that you use normally, you will have a SuSE entry you can boot to.

You want to avoid having more than one distro install grub to the disk's MBR. You would have a dueling distro situation. In that case, with the MBR being replaced by the last distro you installed or updated.

make sure you know what partition number it is if xp is first it will be hdd0,0 or 0,1 mint second hdd 0,1 or 0,2 ubuntu third hdd 0,2 or 0.3
so choose 0,1 for mint to be WIPED and suse on top of it