Will Install Mint Soon, but Skeered ...

[Peterburd]

I'm going to install Mint on my desktop pretty soon, but I'm worried and want to clear up some potential problems beforehand.

I'm now dual-booting XP and Feisty. I have three hard drives.

The first is the master IDE drive where XP currently resides. The second is a slave IDE which is NTFS. Feisty and XP can read the data, and it's my storage area. The third is a SATA drive where, because of my botched install, Feisty currently resides.

I want to install mint on the first drive and destroy Windows forever (rah rah!). I'm sure the guided install will allow me to do this. Then I will wipe the SATA drive to remove Feisty.

But what about the MBR? I suspect it should be on the master IDE, and I'm hoping that the complete install on that drive will erase the Grub choices and boot automatically to Mint, but WHAT IF IT DOESN'T???

My botched Feisty install (for which I blame myself, not Ubuntu) ended up with a crowded Grub full of failed installations and a couple visits to the fixmbr command. I don't want to go there again.

Should I unplug the SATA drive before I install so the installation won't see my ubuntu drive?

Skeered.

Peter

[Zwopper]

It shouldn't be a problem either way...
...and IF something gets messed up, theres always the great tool: [SUPERGRUB]
It works beautifully...

[MagnusB]

One of two options, when you clear out the Feisty installation you should also delete most of GRUB, including the list of broken installations. Because GRUB consists of two stages, the first which resides on MBR which just initiate stage 2, where stage 2 does the actual booting.
If you have a separate partition with GRUB on it, I think the same approach will do the trick.
Second option is to just install Mint over Feisty, then it will most likely rebuild GRUB. But then again I might totally wrong...

[McLovin]

You can just use the guided install and install Mint to the primary IDE HDD and it will automagically overwrite the Grub with the new one, which is good cause Mint uses a GFXBOOT Grub, and is very pretty, prettier that a $20 wh**r then when you have all the settings that you need from your Ubuntu install, (if there are any that you need from there, or maybe files you need from it) you can just use GParted to reformat that HDD. No need to unplug it though, why open the case if it's not necessary, that's just asking for those little dust bunnies to come hopping on in and cause some mischief.

[Peterburd]

Thought I'd get back to you. I installed tonight and ... it works almost perfectly. Okay, the Wacom tablet is a little wonky and when I tried to shut down it froze for a minute or two, but I'd just installed a ton of stuff, so I'm not worried. All the sound issues I had have vanished. With Feisty I might have to restart a couple of times before I heard the bongo noise it makes when the username screen appeared (no bongos, no flash, I learned). So far that's not an issue here.

Interesting that the grub now offers me Mint and Feisty (since that's on a drive that wasn't touched, I suppose). Windows doesn't appear at all, and I'm happy about that.

Thanks for the reassurances!