Thank you for your reply. I am indeed chainloading grub to the longhorn loader (which is Microsoft's answer to grub used by Vista and Longhorn). My mbr points to Grub which points to initrd, which I can edit manually (gotta love linux for your ability to do almost anything with a simple text editor). I have no idea how the longhorn loader works, however, so I was concerned that when I restore my mbr using my bootable cd (you still use floppy disks?) I would loose the longhorn loader since I cannot simply restore my current working grub configuration. I have no worries that after restoring my mbr I can get grub and any posix compatible OS, but I know very little about this new longhorn loader. I will go to my test network and install vista on a new drive, then install XP which will kill my longhorn loader, then install FC 7, I am confident that grub will indeed find the longhorn loader even after the XP wipe of the mbr, but I want to do it in a test environment before I try to install XP on my tri-booting GUTSY, Vista, FC 7 laptop (believe me I would be happy to eliminate all Microsoft products from all of my computers but my field laptop requires uber-compatability beyond the capabilities of wine or cedega). I will let you know how it goes.