Re: new computer with large hard drive

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Wendell Cochran  on Fri, 2 Dec 2005
03:45:59 -0800


> > Dual booting is extremely tempting but altogether tricky. Not
> > something I recommend, candidly, on your workhorse machine.

> Surprise & consternation! In the Linux world, dual booting is
> extremely common, & problems with boot loaders seldom come up in
> mailing lists.

I'm *only* talking about dual-booting 9x and NT Windows. I've dual-booted
non-Windows for years, and no problems (at least, not until OS/2's Logical
Volume Manager rolled in). But boot loaders can and do get messed up.
Cylinder 0 Sector 63 is the MBR; non-Windows OSes can mess with it, and render
Windows unbootable. I concede, I may be overly pessimistic here; I am
constantly messing with operating systems, repartitioning, resizing logical
drives, etc etc, and I have problems (or would, if I hadn't learned how to work
around them). If you NEVER tinker with any of that, and you install in the
right order to begin with, the issue might never arise. But it can and does
arise if, for example, one of your OSes fails and you need to fix it from a
boot diskette or CD. Or if your partitioning tool doesn't understand that you
are multi-booting and rewrites the wrong MBR data.

I still contend that the two-computer solution is a much better option. You
can have concurrency in two environments. You can communicate between
machines. And most important, when one machine has a problem, you can Google
the fix with the other machine. Rebooting all the time to switch OSes is
ridiculous. If you really do need two operating systems, then you probably
need them all the time.

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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