On Tuesday 18 November 2003 03:07 pm, Melissa Reese wrote: > Hi Bryan, > > As long as I can be very sure that I'm only messing with my 20 GB > drive, I'll be happy to stumble through some more trial and error > myself, because if all I mess up is the fresh drive with no essential > data on it yet, I can always just start over.
Linux has been unusually forgiving of me and I am a tinkerer that messes with stuff that he doesn't really understand quite a lot. I wouldn't think that you would be progressing as far as I usually do initially, especially since you appear to be demonstrating quite a bit more caution than I do, sometimes to my detriment. > However, there's another > thing I'll have to decide with regards to how worried I should be > about performing the installation without expert supervision... Anne was right about committing changes. You will go through the entire process and then Mandrake will ask you before it commits the changes to the hard drive. The only change that might be significant is replacing the XP bootloader with lilo by writing to the Master Boot Record and that can be undone very simply with no problems at all. I have never had any issues with removing Linux and in my initial experimentations with a lot of different distributions, I did that many times. > > The starter guide also suggests possibly changing a setting or two in > the BIOS in order to make the installation smoother for MDK. Since the > BIOS is, as far as I understand it (which may not be very far), a > system wide setting (affecting both hard drives, no?), I want to be > especially careful messing about in there. At this point, it is this > BIOS thing as much as anything else that concerns me. Shouldn't. You can always change things back and Windows is pretty tolerant of BIOS changes for the most part. I am surprised that it suggested you make changes, Linux ignores the BIOS in large amounts and actually uses its settings for small things that are configurable in Linux without making BIOS changes. APIC for instance which I initially turned off in BIOS but is configurable on the lilo load line. Why don't you discuss some of those suggested changes here and perhaps we can put some of your concerns to rest by explaining exactly what they are and what the likely effect on WinXP would be? -- Bryan Phinney Software Test Engineer
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