The title pretty much says it all. Here's the situation:
I decided to install a couple of other Linux distros on my laptop for experimentation purposes. Last night I installed Sabayon and I have a fresh copy of Fedora 12 ready to go on, as well.
I originally intended to do a fresh install of Karmic because Sabayon's GRUB required the /boot partition to be on ext3 and I was unsure whether it would detect my Jaunty installation, which is on ext4 partitions. It did, and all was well, so I decided instead to install Fedora 12 and do an upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic as an experiment, to see how it would go. No problem if it doesn't work to my satisfaction...I'll do a fresh install if it doesn't.
Then something occurred to me; if I perform an upgrade to Karmic without Jaunty owning GRUB Stage 1 (in the MBR), will the upgrade process install it's GRUB in the MBR area or will I lose access to it?
I have no problem editing the menu.lst (since I assume the only thing that would change is the kernel version) and I have no problem doing a fresh install if things go awry. I just want to experiment with doing an upgrade versus a fresh install since I usually do a fresh install when upgrading. I'll likely do a fresh install after the experiment anyway.
The only reason I ask this is that I haven't installed Fedora yet. If the upgrade process installs GRUB 2 in the MBR, then I'll probably go ahead an install Fedora now. However, if it doesn't I'll install it after the upgrade and let Fedora's installer detect it so I can access it and evaluate it.
The only concern I have for my present installation is my BOINC projects. I have the client set to accept no new projects and once I run them out I'll start the upgrade process. The rest is (or will be) backed up to external hard drive.
Can I expect any issues?
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