Installation overwrote windows installation too easily

James Takac p3nndrag0n at gmail.com
Mon Sep 8 15:13:53 UTC 2008


Hi Karl

On Monday 08 September 2008 21:49:56 Karl Larsen wrote:
> Ken McLennan wrote:
> > G'day there One & All,
> >
> >>     Alas there is no software I am aware of that can tell the
> >> difference between Windows and any other data on a Hard Drive.
> >
> >    It doesn't have to determine any differences, nor to find what OSes
> > are installed anywhere. It needs to halt the process, offer a dialog
> > with an explicit warning to the user about what will happen and giving
> > them an opportunity to back out just in case they DO have windows (or
> > Solaris, or Fedora, or Mandriva, any other OS) installed. It doesn't
> > matter whether they do or not, but should provide the warning for a
> > worst case scenario.
> >
> >    I doubt it would be difficult, just a dialog with a "Cancel &
> > Return" option and a "Go Ahead and Nuke" option.
> >
> > See ya,
> > Ken
>
>     Loose a lot of Ubuntu converts that way. A Windows user knows little
> or even less than that about a computer. You ask them how many hard
> drives, they ask "what is a hard drive?".
>

That's quite a generalization. It sounds from your post that all windows users 
don't have a clue. That's simply not true, I used windows for years and got 
to know it quite well before I discovered linux. And then certain aspects of 
linux confused the hell out of me for a while. I've learned a bit since then 
but still have a ways to go. Just like with the English language, no one 
person can no all of it and hence the potential for a stuff up is always 
there.. Just like a test in my highschool days. I knew full well binary maths 
but I messed up in the exam on just such a question nevertheless. And this 
was when I knew more than the teacher on the subject. Point here is that no 
matter how much we (think we) know, we can still mess up

>     In a perfect world everyone would be born computer smart and then
> you can ask them to use $sudo fdisk -l and decide from the output. That
> was how early Linux was done. A README said "make a partition and give
> it an ext2 file system". Then load the system from the cd-rom. Then
> there were very few Linux users :-)
>
>
> Karl
>

Don't know if you realised yet but we don't live in a perfect world

James


>
> --
>
> 	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
> 	Linux User
> 	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
>    PGP 4208 4D6E 595F 22B9 FF1C  ECB6 4A3C 2C54 FE23 53A7



-- 
If a man hold himself dear, let him watch himself carefully; the truth guards 
him who guards himself. If a man makes himself as he teaches others to be, 
then, being himself subdued, he may subdue others; one's own self is indeed 
difficult to subdue. If some men conquer in battle a thousand times a 
thousand men, and if another conquer himself, he is the greatest of 
conquerors. 

Dharmapada




More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list