F 17 Upgrade Question

[WhiplashX2007]

I am currently dual-booting F16 and Win7. I have recently got into the mode of using Linux a LOT more than windows, so I decided to upgrade to F17. My questions are:

Will upgrading to the new version affect my boot sector in any way? - I'm mainly worried about it wipping my Win7 partition. Just curious if it will only mess with my linux partition.
Will it erase my files?

[Gareth Jones]

How are you planning to upgrade?

The upgrade will replace the boot-loader with F17's version of GRUB2 (assuming that you're using GRUB to load both OSes), but it should properly detect and add an entry for Windows as long as you don't modify the Windows partitions. If you use the pre-upgrade method, you shouldn't have a problem (at least with Windows, there are other known boot issues with F17 pre-upgrade, but they're reasonably straightforward).

If you do a fresh install of F17, just make sure not to touch the Windows partitions in the partitioning section of the installer (except to set up a mount-point of course). If you have a separate partition for /home (i.e. separate from the root partition), similarly set it to mount at /home but not be formatted, so that your personal Linux files and settings are kept.