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 -- richard bown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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