Hi,
Can I uninstall and reinstall winxp on my system with dual boot wihtout affecting the linux(mandrake 10.1) installation. how should I go about doing it??


many thanks.

Well, you can format its partition, reinstall it there, but XP will (and I dont htink its avoidable) mess with your MBR (i.e GRUB or LILO, it'll go back to NTDLR or w/e it uses). But you can pop in some LiveCD and reinstall grub or lilo again if you want...

This need to be confirmed by advanced user obviously, but there are probably two cases :

1. You are using only one hdd
Assuming u are using lilo, if you reinstall XP you may find that the LILO boot prompt no longer appears. XP is probably writing on your master boot record during installation.
Prepare a linux boot disc in order to reinstall lilo just in case. ( Keep an eye on loadlin as well )

2. You are using 2 hdd
In my case, i do have linux on hda and xp on hdb.
When i did my xp reinstallation, i simply disconnect my hda drive and reconnect it right after the xp installation.

Yes, you can, and yes it will over-write grub or lilo. You'll need to use a live CD (as previously mentioned) to boot back into your system and reinstall your preferred boot loader once you finish reinstalling the boot virus, umm I mean windows.

If you wipe the XP partition and reinstall it back there (without touching your Mandrake partitions) then WinXP will install it's bootloader over Lilo.
Have your Mandy install CD1 (or DVD) to hand, and when you've finished setting up Windows to your liking (installed all drivers etc with all the necessary rebooting etc etc) boot your Mandy CD1/DVD. Press F1 when you get to the welcome screen for the options. Boot into rescue mode (the boot option for this is listed on the F1 options page you just loaded) and select 're-install bootloader'.
Lilo gets rewritten to the MBR and will add your Windows partition automatically.

EDIT
Remember, if you have your Windows partition mounted so that it's readable in Mandrake, you'll have to unmount it before you do the re-install otherwise Mandy won't see the newly installed XP (been there, done that).