Win XP and repartitioning

[Monty Harder]

Eric Gilliland <jegilliland at hotmail.com> wrote:

>I am running Win ME and Mandrake 8.0 on my dual boot Dell 8100.  If I
>upgrade to Win XP, does anyone know if it will erase my linux partition?

  In my search for a new computer, I've had the opportunity to see XP (Home)
preinstalled on several systems.  What I see is still using a Partition
Table, with two FAT32 partitions (hda2 is a 3~4G Restore volume, the purpose
of which is to fix XP when it goes South - there is NO CD with these
machines).  That leads me to believe that XP is capable of coexisting with
Linux once it's installed.  But to be safe, I'd feel a lot better if you
told me you were planning on putting ME on a separate physical drive from
Linux, and then lying to the BIOS to tell it that you don't even have the
Linux drive before you "upgrade" the thing.  Historically, Windows has not
been kind with other OSes that it can see.