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Derek D. Martin wrote: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Narayan Gangadhar wrote: > I have a doubt. I had installed > LINUX my comp and windows -95. > I had a lilo loader installed. > > Later on i installed windows -98 > and suddenly the liloloader > disappeared. The comp direcly > booted in Windows -98. Yup. When you install any Microsoft operating system, it overwrites the boot sector with its own. You need to boot Linux from a boot floppy (or the CD if you have a bootable one) and run lilo to fix this. Yup; yup. And it doesn't even take an install. On the few occasions that I've booted W95 on my linux box, I've several times found that the linux partition was no longer bootable. Digging around, I found two very relevant things in the MS docs: One is a comment in an obscure part of a thick manual to the effect that they "help" you by turning off the bootable flag on partitions that don't contain valid MS operating systems. The other is the passage in the license stating that if you boot a MS operating system, you thereby give Microsoft the right to do anything at all to anything on the disk. They're being nice by only overwriting your boot sector. According to their license, they could legally wipe the whole linux partition. Or, if you are attached to the net, their software can legally send anything on your disk back to headquarters, to be used for any purpose they wish. Sometimes you can learn interesting and amusing things by reading the fine print. To bad more MS customers don't do this. - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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