hi,
ok right now i have 2 partitions set up one being fedora and the other being windows xp pro. Before installing any of them I used partitionmagic and created partitions for each and installed windows xp followed by fedora. when i installed fedora it also installed grub to manage partitions.

My question is: Is it possible to install suse over fedora without screwing up grub and windows? If yes how would i do so?

You mean you want to replace Fedora with SuSE?

In this case I would delete the Fedora partitions with partition magic, and leave the empty space for partitioning with Yast. Yast will overwrite the Fedora grub and automatically recognize the Windows partition. Even if this is not the case, it is easy to do that manually.

If you want to keep Fedora (and still have empty space on the hdd) then install Suse as usual, but do not write grub into the MBR, write on a floppy instead. You can either use the floppy to boot suse, or modify the fedora menu.lst (or grub.conf) to add the suse partition.

I don't understand why so many people use 3rd party partitioning products. I've never had any problems using the distro/s partitioning program.

If I need to resize my NTFS partion I usually use Mandrakes partitioning tool to do it however.

what partition type is Fedora on now? Chances are SuSE will be able to install on the partition Fedora was on. You'll want to format it anyway, even if you don't completely remove it. Also, SuSE will want to replace your bootloader with a Grub, even if you don't switch to Lilo. I'd backup, or better yet, print out, your current Grub config, so you can append your other OS sections to the supplied SuSE section.

In general I agree, but since cartman12345 already owns a 3rd party program and there are problems with parted in SuSE9.1, I thought it would be less trouble to use PM instead of parted. But it does not seem to apply to his problem/question anyway, since the disc is partitioned already, so PiLgRiM hit the point.