> So a hardware problem would be completely missed by SMART and a clean FULL
> format and a thorough scandisk and a defrag that results in erasing the
> linux partition?
If your controller was acting up this could easily cause such a
problem.
> I would love to know how a hardware error would result in only wiping out
> the linux partition and leaving the windows one fully intact with no errors
> or anything.
I wasn't part of the first round of this and certainly don't want to
argue with you about this. But consider that your Windows partition
is the first partition on the drive. Its boot sector is at the head
of the drive. Your Linux boot location is at a partition boundary.
If that partition boundary isn't maintained properly, it and your
Linux book code could easily get overwritten and yet not affect the
operation of Windows.
Unless you've got your Windows drive completely full, it's likely that
you can go into your partition table and truncate your Windows
partition by a few meg and it won't have any affect on the operation
of Windows. Expanding it by even a little bit will destroy your
access to Linux.
> Yet Linux can be reinstalled and work *perfectly* without *ever* crashing or
> generating a single error on that same partition that the windows defrag so
> kindly removed for me.
Yep...you do a new installation, it identifies a location for the boot
info, puts it there and it works...until you set some program loose
that will do some writing at that partition boundary. Just a
thought...have you compared the exact sizes of partitions given you by
both Linux and DOS utilities? Do they agree in terms of start/end
points?
Cheers --- Larry
