UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I currently have Gutsy, Fedora Core 7, and Vista running on the same hard disk and want to add XP to it. XP will of course kill my grub which I can get back with supergrub easily. I have no worries that my two Linux Distros will come back when I do this because Grub only points from the mbr to the second stage loader. I do not know as much about the Longhorn loader which Grub currently finds with no problem. Will the XP wipe of my mbr kill my longhorn loader beyond recovery by supergrub?

I have never heard the term "longhorn" loader before. Nor "supergrub". But the mbr can only point to one place. If it is pointing to grub then that is all it points to. It sounds like you use grub to chainloader into your longhorn loader. If the mbr is trashed and you restore it, you are back to normal. I like to build a little floppy that will invoke grub. Then if someone scribbles on my mbr, I just boot from the floppy, get a grub command line, and fix the mbr.

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.