Installing XP after Linux?
 

Just fixed up a nice debian box and I left some free space on /dev/hda (which contains /, /boot, /usr, /var, /tmp),

Turns out that I'd like to put XP on this extra ~15gb which is free. Just for MS Office for other users that might need some quick jobs (i.e. girlfriend).

Is there any way to do this without messing up Grub? Or will I have to break it, and then fix it? How will this work.

Thank you very much!

I think you'd have a nice fallback position if you first created a GRUB boot floppy and got it to work before you let XP touch the partition, since XP is not very good about leaving the MBR alone.

I just posted a short description here, at the 6th entry, describing how to make a boot floppy on Fedora. I think that, except for the Fedora floppy mount point of /media/floppy, you should be able to do the same thing on Deb.

Then, even if XP overwrote the MBR, you can still boot your Deb system and tell GRUB to setup again, as described at the end of my post referenced above.

As an aside: Is there anything in MS Office (unless she's using MS Access) that she couldn't do in OpenOffice? OpenOffice can read and write almost all MS Office documents.