originally i was running sun java desktop, which i'm pretty sure is suse 9.0 with a purple paintjob. any way i was dual booting just fine, and then windows attacked. I was helping a friend out with a senior project, ended up having to download SP2 to get this wireless stuff to work. don't know why, but it seemed to solve the problem. anyway, a while later i restart and i believe the error was GRUB 0 and then it would hang. Anyway, I tried and tried and couldn't boot to anything. finally made a bootdisk and booted SJD back up and moved all my personal files from the windows drive to my external hard drive and reinstalled. I've attempted this on several occasions with different distros and using lilo and it still seems to become un-bootable or nearly so. being that i'm a little inexperienced i usually make things worse for myself. The common thread seems to be SP2, but this hasn't always been the case. The point of the post being what do i need to do to keep from trashing my windows drive every time i install linux? and has anyone else had problems with SP2 on a dual boot machine? I may be off my rocker here, but does XP somehow block writing to the MBR?
 
anyway, with finals fast approaching i'm hesitant to try again for a few weeks.
 
btw i'm running a 120gb WD as the master and a 80gb as the slave.
 
just looking for some suggestions before i try this again. any help would be much appreciated