Will installing Windows 7 on top of Ubuntu / Vista machine wipe out the Ubuntu boot menu?

Question

I remember some time ago installing Vista on a new partition of a "Ubuntu / Vista" machine, and the Ubuntu boot menu was gone?

So now there is a machine with Vista and a few Ubuntu installations (Ubuntu 8 and 9.04), and then another boot selection made by Wubi.

So there are 2 boot selection menus, one after the other. The first one with a few choices, and the second one with 2 choices.

So now if Windows 7 is installed on this machine, will it wipe out one or both of the boot selection menus? In that case, will making a partition bootable again involve some work?

If that's the case, I may as well boot to all the partitions first and make sure I copy the data over and delete the partitions I don't need, and keep the needed OS to a minimum and then install Windows 7, so there will be less work to make the partitions bootable again.

Answer 1

Yes, it will cause problems. Use EasyBCD to fix it after, it works really well and it's free.

Answer 2

You should be able to simply boot off the Ubuntu DVD and reinstall Grub in the MBR without difficulty. In my very limited test, Windows 7 did eliminate Grub as part of its install process.