Re: Windows won't boot after installing Suse 9.1

From: David Wright (david_c_wright_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 08/25/04 

Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 09:59:02 +0200

B Gruff wrote:

> Voop wrote:
>
>> Does anyone have any helpful suggestions?
>
> Sorry Voop - not really qualified (as a newbie myself) to answer your
> question directly, but addressing this to the gurus here:-
>
> Guys:-
> Why do we DO this?
> For somebody new to Linux, giving it a try, etc., surely the most
> off-putting thing that can happen is that they lose their Windows
> system? - and these are the very people that we want/need to have a
> positive first experience?
>
> Why do we persist in publicising a dual boot from the hard drive?
> Wouldn't it be better to stress the advisability of using a boot
> floppy initially? That way:-
> Floppy in = Grub boot
> No floppy = Your Windows computer as it was
>
> There's nothing lost - when they have found their feet, they will twig
> that they can very easily change it to do all their booting from the
> HD if they want?
>
> Wouldn't it save a lot of heartache?
> As I see it, at the moment, the onus of multiple boots falls on Linux,
> and when something goes wrong, it's Linux that gets the blame?
> In fact, would SuSE et, al do well to make Floppy the default, on the
> basis that anybody who knew what they were doing (like wat we expert
> newbies do now!) would also know to change it?
>
> Bill

I don't have floppy drives on any of my machines - well not strictly true, I
had to buy one for my AMD64 machine to load the SATA drivers into the
Windows setup program, but it is disabled again...

But the problem seems to be a Microsoft inspired hack of the BIOS for large
hard drives...

I always advise either dedicating the machine to one OS or having swappable
drives, it save a lot of heartache in the long run...

Dave

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