Dual booting Mdk10 + WinXP - reinstalling XP
 

Hi all

After getting a little sick of various shortcomings on windows i set the family PC up with Mandrake 10. The family like it and we're sticking with it. However we do need to retain WinXP for certain games / programs.

The current state of the hard drive is a split between windowsxp and linux. I want to wipe and reinstall WinXP without losing the ability to get into linux / any of my linux partitions / data.

I get the impression from past experience that if i reinstall winxp it'll overwrite the MBR and the only option i'll have on the windows bootloader is windows? Am i correct in this assumption? How can i get round this problem?

I am aware that having windows and linux co-existing on the same disk is not always ideal (in my main workstaion they're on seperate drives) but that isn't an option in this PC.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Thin

Install windows XP as usual when you finish boot whit the first cd of mandrake then type rescue and reinstall lilo or grub.

above solution
 

I tried doing the same thing you're about to do except with win2k and the rescue didn't work for me... at least the first time. Even the install wouldn't load. But i tried 3 times and, by magic, it reinstalled the bootloader (but i had to create a new user). I think you should be fine