Saving LMDE@ when upgrading to Windows 10

[tlcmd]

Advise, please. I am running a dual boot HP Envy 700-216 computer with a quad core Athlon chip, 12 Gigs of RAM, and a 2 TiB HDD. I have 500 Gigs devoted to my Windows 8.1 partition and the rest to LMDE2 (Betsy). In the very near future, I am planning to upgrade the Windows partition to Windows 10. While I plan a complete back up of my documents, etc from both the Windows and LMDE2 partitions, is there any way I can reasonably protect my LMDE2 partition from being wiped by the Windows 10 upgrade? The HP BIOS is quite a different beastie from those of other CPU's I have used.
Thanks,
tlcmd

[z31fanatic]

W10 will not wipe your LMDE partition because it simply installs over the W8.1 partition. It won't touch the Linux partition. I've done it a couple times.

[Fred Barclay]

I have heard that upgrading to Windows 10 will overwrite GRUB, though (which isn't a big deal as it can easily be fixed). z31, can you confirm this is true (or not)?

OP: are you familiar with reinstalling GRUB from a live disk/usb?

[z31fanatic]

I have seen a couple of people on here report that it overrode GRUB but I didn't have that problem. GRUB just won't know that W7 or W8 is now W10. It will still say W7 or W8.
That said, OP should save all his data from the Linux partition to an external drive just in case. Having your data is a lot more important than the operating system being wiped and having to re-install again.

[tlcmd]

Thanks, all y'all. I do plan to back up my LMDE2 data to an external HDD. However, I so rarely boot to Windows, I didn't want to throw the baby out with the bath.

[tlcmd]

Thanks again. Worked perfectly. Appreciate the advice.
tlcmd