It's not surprising that people are a bit nervous about losing stuff, as you do
read a few horror stories. Perhaps my experiences will encourage some others.

I had done one install of HH on a spare PC, where it didn't matter if I lost
anything. This worked really well but I was still unsure about putting it on my
main PC.

Having taken advice from this group, I moved everything from my second hard
drive to C: and then did a clean install on my now free drive, having first
downloaded every MBR repair program I could find! This worked perfectly and I
was able to dual boot into either OS, at first with Ubuntu as the default.
Because my son uses the PC too, I wanted to make Windows first default and found
this easy to do by editing the .lst file.

Ubuntu could see my Windows partitions but XP refused to recognise the ubuntu
drive. I have now installed Ext2 IFS for Windows and am able to move documents
easily between the two OS's. Everything was very straightforward and I am very
impressed with the way Ubuntu has developed.

Ubuntu is now my first choice, though I still need to keep XP as I maintain a
website using Dreamweaver and have, as yet, to find anything to compare with it
in Linux.