Ok, I have Windows ME right now dual boot with Redhat 7.2. With GRUB as my boot loader. I'm going to get Windows XP Professional soon. I am going to format my Win ME partition and probably convert it to NTFS and install Windows XP. What I want to know is, would I still be able to dual boot into XP (once installed) and Redhat 7.2 with GRUB? Do I have to change anything in GRUB etc?

Well, this is what I recomend and this is only my opinion! First in redhat creat a boot disk if you dont already have one, then once you have that done boot over to windows and perform your upgrade, now windows will probably try to rewrite yor mbr so thats why I said the thing about the boot disk then once your upgrade is complete and if windows creates a new mbr you can boot to linux with your boot disk and then re install GRUB from there just to let you know I am not that famillar with grub but I do have Xp home and RH 7.2 on my laptop and just prefer the boot disk method some people don't, I just like it when I start my computer and windows starts as normal and then when I want RH I reboot with my boot disk and then I have linux. AS for the ntfs you should have no problem there also. Hope I helped, and good luck :)

thanks for replying 3Ly...but I do not want to upgrade my Windows installation. I want to do a clean install of Windows XP. Would GRUB be able to dual boot my computer?

I have windows xp and linux redhat 7.2 on my computer and grub works but my primary partition is fat32. as you know linux redhat 7.2 doesn't support reading ntfs filesystem by deafualt. so I think if you convert your primrary partition to ntfs you can't use grub boot loader. and if you install windows xp I think you should install grub again becuase windows changes your MBR. bye

linux in general can read ntfs but can't write to it, it can mess it up and then windows is lost. but grub can boot an ntfs drives, that is what i have, xp and red hat 7.3 when xp installs it will load its boot manager to the mbr, and you could try and use the nt boot loader but i couldn't get it to boot linux. i would try installing grub again, but the time i did an over haul of windows, i also had to install linux again because it wouldn't just install the boot loader for me. maybe its time to move from 7.2 to 7.3

Appologies before hand about my long ramballing experience in advance ; I Have W98se, Linux SUSE 8 & WIN XP Pro all booting up. I dont offer any tech evidence of how I done it as I am sure there are numerous ways to achieve it. Bootloaders should be able to handle it all (after all thats their job - oh and since I dont have a scooby doo how to tweak and edit Linux yet and I am still in the WINDOZE dry out clinic :-) 40mb HD 1 Clean Install W98se on fully formatted 40mb fat32 primary partion. 2. Installed Suse, set the size of the SWAP (1.1G) and / (at ~11G). Resized the windows FAT32 primary to (~12G), and left the other space as UNSUSED. (system boots nicely with the LILO SUSE bootmanager(loaded in the MBR) ..everythings ok) 3. Installed XP pro, that sees the unused disk space (I chose to keep it FAT32 rather then NTFS). (system boots but no LILO only the XP boot dos boot manager) Reboots from the SUSE install disk (since I NEVER made that boot disk - fool that I am. Attempts a Re-install, it sees the existing install and lets me boot up into Linux. From there I go through the YAST system control and re-install the boot manager into the MBR making a few small tweaks for startup preference) Now it boots into the LILO where I can choose LINUX or WINDOWS? choosing windows then puts me to the XP boot manager choice of 98 or XP. I am quite sure there is a more sleek way of getting this to work (maybe installing the LILO boot manager to a FAT 32 or Linux's own HD (rather than MBR) and then pointing the XP boot manager to it or vica versa...but I am knackerd and now have square eyes being up all through the night getting it going. but it WORKS and I realy need to learn more about linux before attempting it another way. Hope this can help in any way.. stevie

Okay...thanks for the replies. If I keep RH 7.2, from the replies, I should reinstall GRUB so it can then boot Windows XP and linux. How do i actually do that?