I am running Windoze XP Pro and Mandrake 10.1 on a dual boot hard drive. Windows has been corrupted and needs a fresh install. My question is can I just format the fat 32 partition and reinstall Windozs without any thing happening to linux? Will this damage to boot record and linux will no longer dual boot Or will I have to format both OS's and start from scratch?

Most likely, Windows will overwrite the boot record of the disk you install it on. What you need to do is:
(1) make a boot floppy (or have/make a Live CD)
(2) install windows
(3) use the floppy/CD to boot up linux
(4) in linux, reinstall your boot loader of choice (lilo, grub, ...).

hth --Jonas Kölker

My experience with installing WinBlows ( Why would you want too? Just use all that new space with linux )

Anyway I realize that not everyone can make a clean 100% break from windows if only because of games.. so

Just boot your computer with your winblows boot disk. FDISK your drive MAKE SURE YOU ONLY REMOVE YOUR WINDOWS PARTITION .... At this point you don't have to make a new partition or format. Unless you have a specific reason for needing something other than a NTFS partition.

Boot with your WinBlows XP CD and use the Unpartitioned space, and have windows format quick using NTFS
Install as normal. when you are done and are ready to re-install your boot-loader.

Boot with your Mandrake CD / DVD and when the option comes up to press enter for install or F1 for more options. Press F1 then at the prompt type 'rescue' and when the menu comes up tell it to re-install boot-loader.. and it will go through and verify your installations and re-do Lilo for you Exit this menu and remove your DVD and reboot and enjoy..

Hope this helps.

I have a fedora core 3 installation (heidelberg) with Dual Boot. I've had to reinstall linux recently while keeping windows intact. Due to shortage of space, I decided to scrap a 5GB partition that was lying idle on my XP installation.

Only when I rebooted windows, i found out that it was completely useless to run any app installed on the Windows Partition (the windows root drive is a 10GB parition). Now, I am wondering whether its possible to reinstall just a working version of XP (LOL, there never is such a thing, i know)- while keeping GRUB intact.

I've seen the messages on how i can type grub-install /dev/Xda using resucue disk. I am not sure about this route though. I dont have a floppy drive to begin with- but have one CD labelled "rescue disk"-

So i am wondeirng if anyone can guide me as to how i can use this to reinstall grub after a wierdows re-installation