I think the MBR can't be of any trouble, because it is completely overwritten by the bootloader (as far as I know) It's only a small space, where a link to the rest of the booting files resides. Is it really possible to manipulate the MBR so that it can cause troubles with other OS' ? I know some windows-versions rewrote the MBR on startup, but I never experienced this with win2k. (I used lilo as bootloader)
according to my personal experiences, winXP sucks bigtime. The only 'good' windows versions I know are NT and 2000 (NT, btw, wasn't developed by MS but bought from some other company, and 2k was NT + some extra features) Again, I could be wrong, but that's why I write this and hope for replies :-) Steven On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 22:07, richard bown wrote: > Hi all > > I've had a real bad experience using a hard drive that previously had > winxp on it. > I ran very low on HD space so I took the 60GB HD out of the winxp > machine , installed as hdc and backed up what files I needed off that > drive. > next step was to delete the ntfs partitions and repartition with ext3, > All apparently went well, and I transfered wanted files from hda to hdc. > > Checked everything was all right, and all the files moved across were in > a partiton on hdc. > the next step was to reinstall the system on to the 60GB drive(was hdc), > and to use just 1 HD on this machine. > So fresh install of 9.1 and this is were things went horribly wrong, > on boot up no partitions had been written, tried to repair and failed, > tried using the rescue facility ...that failed. > > So again another fresh install and this time made a boot floppy as well. > again on reboot failure, so used the rescue facility to rerun the boot > loader, > Tried another bootup , same again reran the boot sector loader from > rescue and this time the next reboot was successful.. > After speaking to a few people I'm not the only person to have had > problems with drives after winxp was installed on them. > I suspect this may be a gates measure to deliberately make it awkward > to change OS's once winxp has been installed, microsoft have done this > before. > > Maybe ,and this is the point I'm trying to make, the developers need to > look at the lilo or grub, to assume the MBR to contain hostile material > and delete it before installing. > > If a newbie had decided to kick winxp off their machine and move to > linux, I feel they would give up trying to install linux and go back to > winblows. > > regards > Richard
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