Will erasing master drive leave slave unbootable?

[spanky]

Hi. I have two HDDs on an IDE channel. The master has windows on it and I want to use a disc wiping program to wipe it and install debian linux on it. But I have linux installed on the slave and I'm worried that the MBR is on the master and will cause the slave drive to be unbootable.
When I installed debian linux on the slave it installed the GRUB bootloader. I'm not exactly sure how boot loading works and if the MBR for both discs could possibly be on the master disc.
Do I have anything to worry about? If so, what do I need to do so I can wipe the master.

 

[Nodsu]

Wiping the entire master will kill the bootloader too, yes. The new Linux installer will put on a new GRUB through, so no worries there - all you have to do is to re-add your other Linux to the GRUB configuration.

Why do you want to wipe the whole drive? Just deleting the Windows partitions and creating Debian ones instead should be enough.

 

[korrupt]

Just deleting the Windows partitions and creating Debian ones instead should be enough.

I second that - will save you a lot of work.

Regards,

Korrupt

 

[spanky]

Thanks. I did just that and wiped out the partitions on the master and installed debian and it reinstalled GRUB so I can boot into debian on either disc if I want(although I won't want to. I had debian on the slave(an older, smaller disc) just to play around and learn it and won't need it there now. I'll probably use that disc for backups or something.)