I have no reason to think Vista's boot loader is any less capable of chainloading to Linux than XP has been perfectly capable of doing for many years.
Vista's bootloader is a fat hairy black hole pit of despair. I have had all of vista, xp, linux, freebsd, sco open server 5, and sco open server 6 (a completely different kernel and os, it's Unixware dressing in some Open Server clothes) installed on the same drive in every combination of any 4 out of the 6. It's easy in grub (or lilo, or gag), possible in xp's, freebsd's and even sco's (2 different) boot loaders beleive it or not. But editing vista's BCD is nothing remotely like any of the rest. It's probably _possible_ to use it as the first stage bootloader selector, but it was all I could do to keep vista itself booting let alone anything else. Changes to other parts of the disk that shouldn't have mattered at all kept breaking it. And, not being a text file, you can't just boot up a linux cd or even a bartpe cd and edit it to fix it. Meanwhile, not only did XP not care if some other partition changed size or gained or lost an ntfs filesystem, it didn't even mind when it itself was moved from one partition to another! Projecting _anything_ about vista based on previous experience with xp is the surest way to prove you have no idea what you are talking about, at least when you are talking to people who have actually used vista. Just as I'm sure my complaints above only prove to some vista wizard that I merely don't know the simple answer he knows. So be it. 6 OS's, 5 simple to config by plain text files, all editable by a knoppix cd if no on-disk system can boot, vs vista that requires either buying bootit-ng or somehow booting up some other full-enough copy of windows that it has .net so it can run easybcd. I hear it's possible to get .net onto a winpe cd, but I never saw one and I've customized bartpe/ubcd4win cds lots of times. Maybe there is a util on the install cd which the manufacturer didn't supply and I didn't create with the sony recovery disk creator thingy. All I can say is, you try it, _then_ say how it's no big deal. -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org