dual boot system, reformatting winxp
 

Hi there,

Hopefully someone can answer this.... I have a dual boot system (Fedora Core 2 and WinXP), and I want to reformat XP. I'm sort of worried that when I do that, Microsoft will overwrite Grub and I won't be able to log on to Fedora. Has anyone done this before? Any suggestions?

Zip

WinXP might overwrite your boot sector. In case this happens, make sure you have a bootable floppy which can boot to your Fedora installation.
Get a floppy, format it :
fdformat /dev/fd0
install grub on the boot sector of that floppy, as root user:
/sbin/grub-install /dev/fd0
Try to reboot with this floppy and see if it boots from it, remember that the floppy still needs your fedora installation, so don't remove your fedora installation, otherwise your have to boot manually with grub at startup.
Reinstall XP on the same partition it was before
Boot from your floppy into Fedora
reinstall grub on your hard drive:
/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda

-kl0378

take a look at this site as well:
http://users.ameritech.net/gholmer/h...ot-floppy.html

Windows XP will definetly overwrite your boot sector. It thinks its the alpha OS.

The easiest way???
 

Use only Linux!!!
It can do all you want without needing another os!!:D

yeh, you can also use the same CD you installed linux with to boot off of and redo lilo / grub.

Windows sux0rs

be careful
 

I have recently formatted my XP partition and had quite a surprise. Intentional or not, the windows XP installation CD will not boot with linux partitions or just too many partitions-I'm not sure which. Have a back up plan for sure.

Thank you all for being so helpful!

One more question though, does it have to be a floppy? Can be a zip disk, or a cd-r even?

Zip