Greetings,

I have my current grub.conf setup to boot win98 as one option where the drive is actually the third device (hd1 is a mirror of my FC5 hd0 drive).
...
title Win98
rootnoverify (hd2,0)
map (hd0) (hd2)
map (hd2) (hd0)
chainloader +1
...

My question - is it straightforward to upgrade this drive to WinXP or will I need to make the drive my main boot device and then move it back to hdc1, i.e., will grub survive the reboots as part of the XP install process or will I break something doing this?

tnx - john

With the xp install cd in the drive and the machine starting up, xp should give you the option of which drive/partition to install xp into. The installation will probably break grub by putting the xp bootloader on the MBR of the Master drive.

You will have to boot from your Linux install cd (or another live cd which has grub) to repair grub.

You wil also have to manually edit your grub.conf to change the title of the windows entry, or add a new one if it's in addition to win98.

The win98 entry you have now would also work for xp, just change the title and rootnoverify to point to the new isntallation if it's on a different partition..

Yes, I figured that Windows XP wanting to modify the MBR on the primary disk would cause me heartache. I suspect the easiest thing for me to do would be to physically remove the linux drives, make my existing Win98 drive the primary boot drive, upgrade to winxp, then put the drives back the way they originally were, modifying the Win98 title in my grub.conf file. Not a real problem, for sure.

tnx much - john