Hello everyone. I have a sony cs-17 laptop with 250GB hdd. It had 2 partition initially one of vista and another recovery. I made another partition for my data which was logical drive(name it D). I wanted to install slackware 12 hence i created 2 more partitions from logical drive, during slackware installation it didn`t converted them to ex3 and swap hence i tried to install ubuntu. It worked all well and ubuntu those partitions as 2 primary partitions of 1.5 and 13 gb and they are used as swap and ex3 for ubuntu respectively.
At the time of booting GRUB shows ubuntu, vista and recovery partition options. Now i want to install slackware. If i use slackware dvd to install it then my both the partitions(ex3 and swap) will be used by it hence ubuntu will be lost. Will vista be lost also as ubuntu grub has overwritten vista`s mbr or my vista option will still appear on slackware install.

If vista loader will be lost as slackware will delete ubuntu loader, then is there any way to add vista into slackware loader....

I am very confused please help me....

If you install slackware on top of the ubuntu partition, you will lose ubuntu, but not windows vista. You may however lose the bootloader configuration that allows you to load vista. This is not a big problem though.

If you lose your windows boot option, edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf and add the following lines:

Note that the rootnoverify may not be necessary, but if you use it grub has a different way of determining device nodes. hda (or sda) == hd0, hdb == hd1, etc. So consider that when you update the bold section. The second number in the parenthesis indicates the partition, partition 1 == 0, partition 2 == 1, etc.

Probably would be - first (only) disk, partition 2; recovery will probably be first.

If you rewrite the master boot record MBR with any utility,disc wizard,parted magic and the UBCD are just a few,it will write the MBR for windoz and you can access your windoz and think about regaining your other lost systems...with the UBCD you shoud be able to get it all back as it was with GRUB... testing to see if stages 1 to 5 exist LOL

if you can get a live cd or linux to boot ....we need to know what partition is your recovery one pls?
it maybe the first one?

.....post the results pls

leaping ahead if recovery is P1 windows is P2

title Windows Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

as per syg00 looks good