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Originally posted by lectraplayer
My experience directly counters your point here.
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That shows how great Linux "Choice" is lol!!!
My answer is way off topic, and I apologise in advance; however I felt as we are looking at each other sideways, I should explore with you exactly why I came to those conclusions
I have had specific hard Disks fall over, over a number of years, because of errors in partitioning being reported after the installation another - any other - OS. I never kept a detailed log of these things; if I had, it might have been useful to try and piece together what was in common with the failures.
I've also had Linux work (and Windows stall) on several multiple boot installations - after repartitioning using QtPartEd; then ran Partition Magic which reported differences in ending and starting points on partitions (usually the second), and to refuse to graphically display anything unless it did a "fix" itself.
The fix would then sometimes allow Windows to work and not the other OS, whatever it was!! And it didn't HAVE to be Linux either. I tried with creating a FAT-32 data storage partition on one occasion, same result.
Funny thing is that running a Live CD that allowed partition read and write (not all seem to), I could access and manipulate files (that were not mission critical) on the supposedly non-existent partitions. I even burned a backup CD (using this concept) on a computer that had two CD drives, so that I could salvage data I didn't want to lose.
I believe there must be a lot more goes on under the hood that we don't know about, unless we happen to be gurus speciallising in a particular very narrow area of expertise. (IMHO, could easily be wronmg, lol)
In actual fact, it was this continual inconsistent performance of
Dual-Boot and
Multiple-Boot machines that caused me to look at cold-plug plug-in hard drives using what are generally called "racks". This was on several different machines of different manufacture. I wrote a how to go about it
here
Seldom have a problem with the racks. I still have several dual boots and one was a triple boot which I wiped a recalcitrant distro off and reinstalled SuSE to take advantage of a seperate /home partition. That dual boots with Windows2000 happily. Ecept that the hda1 partition has something wierd going on and I will need to replace the whole drive and convert that one to storage lol!!
The nicest and most reliable HDDs I've ever found were the IBM OEM 10Gb ones sourced by HP for their VL Series Vectra towers in 1998, notwithstanding their restore CD insisting on formatting FAT-16 with two partitions and installing MS Windows95 OSR 2.5 (apparently specially for that model, and much faster than 98SE, a brilliant distro) or NT4, similar scenario, but not so brilliant, without plug-pray, decent sound support, etc. I have two of those Vectras, running 40Gb HDDs now, and both dual boot satisfactorily.
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I would try to define my FAT32/NTFS partitions with Windows's version of Fdisk and it would simply not work half the time, major troubles in the Windows environment. However, when I used the Linux tools, they worked nearly every time in such a way that I rarely had trouble in neither the Windows environment nor the Linux environment. Only trouble I had, aside from my stupidity in writing to an NTFS partition (it was a recovery attempt anyway), was RedHat's visible tendency to not want to write to FAT32 partitions, but that seemed to be a RedHat thing.
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This was my philosophy on what should happen, and led to my doing the plug-in HDD trick. It was idea I explored with three guys on the linspire.com insiders' forums - these fellows had come to similar conclusions it seems. They both have links to their pet articles about it. I know there are couple of errors in mine, but I need to get
a round tuit in order to fix it
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Side discussion: have you ever heard of a hard disk that was so fowled up that you could partition it with any tool you wanted (M$ or Linux), put an OS in, and it would hold it so long as the computer was left running?
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Yeah, but I've only read about them, not experienced them exactly like that. Had other strange things though, lol. Wierd
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I had one of these that if you ever cut the computer off for over ten seconds, the boot sector become unuseable. Windows caused this one and Linux didn't quite have enough to it to hold it up.
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Actually I suspect that as HDDs got larger and larger, and as the OS went from 8bit to 16bit to 32bit lots of different variables nobody ever thought of became fed into the equation. There is a classic signature somewhere which I "stole" to use as part of a set of revolving topics in a chat room I help to manage:
We all know that Windows is a 32-bit patch for a 16-bit GUI shell running on top of an 8-bit operating system written for a 4-bit processor by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition - now we need to come up with something for their 64-bit version of Windows...
I believe that may be part of the reason (ahem, tongue in cheek. I actually like the MS Windows OS for its speed, pretty blue screen graphics and its need for continual preventive maintenance

Actually as a single tasking OS dedicated to an offline purpose I think it performs extremely well and safely)