GRUB Infestation

[vu pham]

Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Leon Goldstein <metapsych at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> A cautionary tale.
>>
>>  I have a scratch drive in my Core 2 Duo box to play with various SMP and
>>  64 bit OS's.
>>  The setup is:
>>  1st partition (primary): Solaris 10
>>  2nd partition (primary): Win XP
>>  3rd partition (primary): Debian
>>  4th partition (logical): swap
>>
>>  I got a set of Debian 4 DVD's from Cheapbytes and installed it in the
>>  3rd partition over an earlier Debian.
>>  Since I use Solaris' GRUB to boot everything, I selected (hd0,2) as the
>>  location to install GRUB for Debian 4.
>>  The installer returned an error, and I remembered that grub-install
>>  often gags on (hdx,y) and prefers the /dev/hdx syntax.
>>  So, you guessed it: I told the installer to put GRUB in /dev/hda2.
>>
>>  That stopped Win XP from booting, and also from mounting, reporting an
>>  unrecognizable file format.
>>  I could not repair the damage using the Win XP install media, so I wound
>>  up having to do a complete reinstall.
> 
> So the lesson here is not to use Windows?
> 

Or just use Windows, not the others :)

In fact, I have a Windows PC that I call "Simplified Windows" : just 
Windows OS and the developer stuff for projects that their SDKs support 
Windows only. No antivirus, no ms office, no email, no ms updates, no 
sharing services. Browsers are for connecting to the server-side 
services on my Linux boxes only. With that simple config, this box has 
been running for six months without any problem : a world record for 
Windows PCs.

Vu