Will installing Windows on a separate disk mess up my existing MBR?

Will installing Windows on a separate disk mess up my existing MBR? I have a spare HDD sitting around I'd like to put Win XP on; it's currently formatted/mounted as an extra NTFS volume on my Ubuntu 9.10 install.
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 362

Total answers/comments: 2

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Guest [Entry]

"The best thing to do would be disconnect your primary drive during the installation. WinXP's installer will write itself to the MBR, but after the installation is complete, your BIOS should boot to your reconnected primary drive and you'll get the Grub menu.

Add this to Grub v1's menu.lst file to add a menu entry for the new installation (assuming WinXP installed on the secondary drive's first partition):

title Windows XP Pro
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Note you may need to update Grub's devices.map file to specify what device (hd1,0) is."

Guest [Entry]

You should have no problem installing XP to a slave drive, as long as the BIOS is set to boot from the first hard disk. The MBR should be written to the disk you specify when installing.