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I have three partitions: a boot partition, a general partition with Windows installed and BitLocker active and a third partion, unencrypted.

Can I install Linux without reinstalling Windows from this setup? Or will this corrupt the boot partition in a way that BitLocker can no longer be used (and I consequently lose access to the main partition)?

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You install linux in this situation , just make sure that you install the grub boot loader onto the unencrypted partition. Also keep in mind that you can only access your bitlocker drive from within windows.

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My fear is whether this can possibly corrupt the (unencrypted) boot partition so the windows partition is no longer available. – Artefacto Jan 20 '11 at 5:32
Didn't work; just butchered my boot partition, like I expected. I installed grub onto it, and when I select the Vista bootloader it just returns to the GRUB screen. Restoring the partition from backup now and hoping it'll work... – Artefacto Jan 20 '11 at 7:30
OK I dd'ed the partition back... I guess now the question is how to install grub so I can boot again to linux and still be able to boot to windows. – Artefacto Jan 20 '11 at 7:36
I'm gonna give this a try: blogs.technet.com/b/voy/archive/2006/10/13/… – Artefacto Jan 20 '11 at 7:42
As I said you should have installed grub onto the un-encrypted partition not onto the current boot partition.If you install it on a partition other than the current boot one linux will pick up that windows is installed already. Also all this is based on your distro being ubuntu ,since i havent tested it on other distros – RC1140 Jan 20 '11 at 11:23
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