Flopping Problems - Historical Persepctive & Dual Booting

[Tom Adelstein]

It might help some understand the unusual questions and comments posted
to this group if a historical perspective existed.

After the remarkable piling on that occurred when I questioned the
authenticity of a post some time back, I have been hesitant (to say the
least) to question anyone's intentions.

Besides, this group is full of great people wanting to make a
difference. I also see in the kinds of questions asked that many people
on this list are recent adopters of Linux.

Some of the questions asked and comments made exist to create doubt. 

I have performed - professionally - hundreds - perhaps thousands of dual
boots going back as far as a project in Brazil for SiemensAG in 1999. I
have never had a problem with any since Grub became the standard. I did
have problems with LILO six years ago, but those problems have been
resolved and few distributions use it any more.

You won't have dual boot problems with Ubuntu and if you do, you might
have a MBR virus or possibly someone manipulated a drive so that the MBR
is read-only. That would be extremely rare and exist on very old Compaq
4.6 GB style drives. Those drives rarely work with current IDE and AIDE
motherboard controllers.

You might find these links useful for a historical perspective.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990203071135/http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/BUSINESS/UPDATES/lat_microsoft0410.htm

http://lists.essential.org/1998/am-info/msg01529.html

It might help if a moderator cleared up some of the odd postings that
don't seem to be on purpose to this list. 

Good luck