Multiple OS booting system

[milosh]

So, I've screwed up a hard drive attempting this once, and I really am hoping that won't happen again. On the other hard drive I did get the multiple OSs to boot separately and work properly all fine and dandy, but when I attempted to uninstall and regroup all of my partitions into a single hard disk it flipped out.

So let me just lay out exactly what I am running and what I plan to do. I have a 160gb hard disk that is divided into two 80gb partitions. Windows XP SP2 is running on the first NTFS formatted partition, and I use the second as an NTFS logical drive for data. I want to install a linux distribution on my second partition. So when I boot up through my Windows Disk and delete the partition should I format it then?

Once I get everything up and running if I want to once again clear the partition with the Linux Distribution on it how do I accomplish that? Last time I used my Windows Disk again to just delete the partition which might be what screwed it up. Any help is appreciated.

[D1st0rt]

GRUB can boot all sorts of things, also generally people try to avoid installing linux on an ntfs partition (typically ends up being ext2 or ext3)

[Money]

i did the same thing 2 weeks ago i just had to reformat, i tried to boot form tthe ubuntu 8.04 live cd and when i shut it down after checking it out i took the cd out and rebooted and magically my xp system folder was corruped or missing LOL lost sooo many pics and music and shit man over 250gb worth of shit

[milosh]

Well I have everything backed up on an external it just pisses me off that I had to buy a new HD.