Dual Boot Windows Xp/Linux Mint without deleting Mint

[paradigmX]

Well, here is the situation, I'm currently running my laptop dedicated to Linux Mint, but for College I need to use Visual Studio for my VB.NET course, I've been running it in a VM but its painfully slow when compiling moderately large programs and I want to setup my laptop as a dual boot with XP so I Won't wait so long for Compile times. This leaves me with a problem, I have a lot of Vital data stored in /home/<username> that I don't want to loose, as well as a lot of configurations I don't want to have to redo. I could repartition my Hard Drive and Install Windows, but that leaves Mint in an un-bootable state as XP seems to need exclusive rights to the MBR when it installs, so that makes that pretty much a bad option. My other option was to backup /home to an external Hard drive, install windows, install Linux Mint and then restore /home afterwards, but I'm not sure the best way to go about it.

I guess my question would be, how could I do this with the least chance of losing my data, and the least amount of inconvenience? I would need to be back up and running before Monday's classes

Any help or advice I could get would be very much appreciated

[Chi]

Restoring Grub after Windows reclaims MBR is actually pretty simple (though with any repartitioning backup is recommended - mintBackup has just been released so it makes that easier too).

check out:
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=6987&p=44363&hilit=restore+grub#p44363
Uses super grub. Small download & it is an awesome tool.