Dual-boot experimentation

[bootard]

Hey everybody-

I have installed linux a couple times before but I want to try out a few different distros. I have a dual boot with windows on the primary hd and linux on the secondary with grub loading on startup. If I am going to be messing around alot with the linux HD and anticipating I might really screw it up once or twice, how should I go about it without fear of loosing my windows data? I already have grub installed, should I just have every distro I install reinstall grub or lilo?

That's alot, but it's all kinda the same issue. Thanks everyone.

[sarumont]

Having every distro install its own bootloader shouldn't be a bad thing, but you would be better off making a ~100M boot partition that you install grub to. Then you can move all your kernels to that partition and edit your grub.conf, keeping the same grub installation while adding distros.

Configuring an existing grub/lilo could get tricky with some installations (as many distros like to do it all for you), but figuring them out is half the fun.