I was playing around with the SuSE evaluation Live CD and when I was done playing around and restarted my system, I got a black screen with a underscore instead of the Windows XP boot screen! I thought live CD's weren't supposed to touch your disks. I finally got it running again but man, what a hassle! I give up trying to play with Linux on my desktop (dual boot setups, live CD's, etc.)

-Brandon

That would depend on what you did while running linux. The CD is not programmed to mess with the disk, but if you run a disk utility, or bootloader install, well, it has to access the hard drive, so...

I would put in the windoze disk and go to recovery console, then fixmbr and fixboot. Another thing I wouldn't give up. Linux is fairly easy to install, following the right process. I suggest buying a RH9(pretty cheap), then installing the 3 disk installation set. (very easy to install)

Hopefully that helps!

-kX

All I did was surf around the net a little with the browser and try OpenOffice. I didn't play with the bootloaders or anything.

I already got the computer working again but, at the time, not even the WindowsXP CD would boot all the way. I would get the message "setup is inspecting your configuration" or whatever and then the screen would go blank like it was going to start the "copying files" portion but nothing ever came up. The screen just stayed blank. I tried with every Windows install CD I could find - XP, Server 2003 Standard, and Server 2003 Web but no luck.

Anyway, I'm not worried about ease of installation. I think my next Linux setup will probably be Gentoo once I get my hands on a computer that I can devote exclusively to Linux. I was just horrified that the SuSE evaluation disc messed up my system.