greetings I am my handle.

I installed fedora core 2 on the second hard drive of my tinker machine, and from what little I understand the boot manager FIFO is installed at the very beginning of disk one

Disk one has windows professional on it that is suffering from the most serious case of window rot I've seen and the registry seems huge and unstable. I intend to reformat the first drive and reinstall windows (so I can use photoshop). I'm worried that it will wipe the boot manager and I'll have difficulty easily booting back into fedora.

Is there a simple method to made back up the FIFO and copy it back to the drive once the fresh install is complete. Or in general what do you do to ensure you can boot to a second hard drive running a linux distribution.

thanks

LILO probably, not FIFO

Not all Windows versions overwrite the boot sector, but I don't know how it is with yours. Writing LILO back is an easy task if you can boot your Linux from a different media (like cdrom or floppy). If you have a blank floppy, use 'mkbootdisk' command (there should be also a graphical tool) to build boot floppy. Test if it brings you your system. If it does, you can reinstall Windows, then use the floppy, boot to Linux and (as root) run 'lilo' command. LILO will overwrite the bootsector.

It's only one of the methods, but I think it's the easiest.