*** Reply to message from Jerry Feldman
While I man not fully agree with Zentara on dual boots, he is dead on with viruses. Many viruses attack the boot sector, or could mess up your partition table. If you do have a dual booting system, make sure that your Windows boot is well protected as some viruses can render the entire system unusable.
happened here and essentially killed my husbands desire to have anything more to do w/ windows, he now has a windows free box ( yay!! ) about a year ago he got some sort of virus that messed w/ the boot sector enough that the box thought it didn't even have enough room to install Dr. Dos 5 or so.. ! And, of course, he lost everything in his Linux partition because we could only get the entire disk back by fooling the boot partition into thinking it was going to be reformatted , again! and that screwed his chance to save his work for the day.. took me 9 hours to bring that box back up, but it was (Suse) Linux only and after a while he got a substitute for stuff that windows weenies use and they aren't going to catch anything if I can keep the mail filters going tightly. (He's not allowed to put a "strange" as in someone else's cd into the cdrom and no floppies that strange people send either. ) I'm considering getting rid of floppy drive altogether, except it does seem a be tter thing to use one w/ gpg info on it than leave that info on a box that *could* be touched by someone else. ( I can't lock him away, he doesn't like it <VBG> besides , it's probably against some convention or other to have someone locked into a room w/ no food or water or breaks for walks to a smaller room, if you guys get my attempt at delicacy there <G>) I do keep his box locked down as tightly as possible , remove anything he doesn't actually need. No apache ... no web creation crap, his website is done by a windows guy... need I say the site was down for the entire duration of the last worm? He thinks I'm weird, but I think he's weirder ... it's not the first time it's happened to him... he has another business ( diving and tours to exotic Islands and suchlike things .. so I'm not certain how diligent the patching is... but it doesn't connect to us here anyway.... so it's no my problem , mon ! Need I say I get a tad fanatical about patching? I don't want to ever go thru a day like that ever again. ( no sleep for several days leading up to the "event" didn't help either... made me real , um, cranky! ) -- j it's just an afterthought; okay ? : Midas was into golden showers.