Windows Reinstall on WinXP/Linux Dualboot
 

My laptop dualboots XP and Ubuntu linux. Unfortunately, XP is doing its standard annual thing--everything starts freaking out, and its time for a reinstall. I'm wondering how difficult it's going to be to get my laptop dual booting again. I'm pretty sure XP is gonna overwrite my MBR meaning I'll have to reinstall GRUB, but is there anything else I need to know? Anything other than my /home and maybe some of /etc that I should backup in case things go to hell?

Thanks...

Anyone? I know there are some Linux users on this forum...

I've done this a couple of times. The Windows install will indeed overwrite the MBR, but a reinstall of GRUB or LILO or whatever you want to use (you can just use your linux distro cd) will get it working again just fine. Why can't Windows just learn to play nice?

...Just don't format the linux partition. I know a certain idiot who has done that on accident one too many times. (I try to learn from my mistakes, but it's so much more fun to make them again and again).

In all fairness, when I tried to create a dual-boot system with Gentoo / Windows, Gentoo overwrote my MBR and killed Windows..

That is Gentoo though, which is not user-friendly for non-experienced users. Maybe something you didn't do properly? I'm not accusing, just saying that gentoo isn't the most playful right out of the box.

While I usually disagree with bendsley on a matter of principal, he's right here.. Gentoo won't detect other OSs and put them in grub's conf. It has to be a manual thing.

As long as you have a livecd or rescue CD (with grub-install on it), I'd say go for it, and good luck :)

You can make a boot diskette (or cd) with grub before you re-install windows. This way you can find Ubuntu on startup with it. Once in Linux you can re-install grub (make sure you put a windows label in it) and all should be good.

There's a make boot disk command you can search for and use the conifugation from your grub.conf.

It should be possible to just boot off the Ubuntu cd and reinstall the boot loader from there. Done that with Gentoo and Slackware at least, can't see that Ubuntu would be different.