I already dual-boot my laptop with a Windows 7 and an Ubuntu 10.10 partition. Since this is both a development and experimenting system, I made a small 15 GB partition for the purpose of trying out new distros and see what I like. Essentially, this is an experiment partition where I can screw around and see what works and what doesn't.

I installed the beta of 11.10 last week, but don't like it too much as it seems to shift quite a bit towards Windows/Mac GUI-centric usage, while earlier Ubuntu distros were a good split between GUI/CLI interfaces.

My issue is it installed a new GRUB overlay. If I reformat the partition, will the OS links in the bootloader be untouched, or do I have to re-install GRUB after the partition format?