"Paul W. Abrahams"
Second, a little care in installation and partitioning can prevent Windows from doing any damage to your Linux partitions.
But one is never fully sure. I recently tried to re-install Win95 on my home machine, as it destroyed itself nearly one year ago. I never cared enough to do something about it, but I know I might well need it soon for some bizarre project. I forgot one had to fight to get a very minimal DOS system first, enough at least to activate the CD-ROM driver, as Windows is not able to do it by itself. And this has to be done on disk, not in memory, because Windows reboots itself from disk while installation goes on, and is not clever enough to first guarantee that the needed CD-ROM driver is on disk. Of course, Windows `fdisk' gives pretty bogus information. What I found especially scary is that `format c: /s' pretends it is formatting the whole disk, and not only the partition put aside for Windows. In practice, however, the Linux contents were untouched. Yet, the FAT describes that it owns the whole disk. It means that immediately after installation, the disk state is corrupt, despite for the user, everything seems to work. All along in the Windows installation process, I observed many other glitches of various kind, not all tiny, but not worth reporting here, and nowhere to report for Microsoft (I'm not going to pay for the mere right of reporting problems). The impression left to me is: bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere! And the beurk feeling I have just no means for getting them eradicated. For me at least, I would prefer installing many SuSE than a single Windows. YaST is not a prison, it leaves me with means to fight, if and whenever problems arise. I may report any glitch I observe to real, speakable humans. And believe it or not, even the smallest things get corrected. :-) -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/