[Gloucs] A word of warning

[David & Sharon]

Why is it that when things are going well, human beings have a desire to 
change them and end up messing up.

I had a perfectly good Suse 10.1 system running, had loaded all the mp3 
libs and w32 codecs for a nice stable multimedia o/s. I could send and 
receive e-mails, read news feeds and whilst doing that listen to my mp3 
collection.  If I wanted to play at messing up, I had a 
kanotix/knoppix/debian partition (hda1) to play with, which could be 
reloaded whenever I wanted, with whatever I wanted to play with next.

So *Why* did I listen to my son, "Can we put windows on please Daddy?" 
After lots of cajoling, I decided to go ahead and let windows take hda1, 
format it fat32 and install itself. Put in Kanotix disc, chroot to my 
Suse partition - which had unexpectedly gone(?!!), no that's ok, the 
drive number has changed, it's still there but hda6 instead of 5. I 
tried editing Fstab to reflect the change and re-run Grub-install, which 
complained about the disc being really messed up and refused to do 
anything. Ok all is not lost, had an old copy of Partition magic to run 
in the newly installed windoze, which told me that I had no partitions 
and the whole drive was Fat32(!?)

Next step, re-install Suse, which then told me that my hdb (backup disc) 
was messed up before crashing due to accumulated muck on the cd's 
(perhaps). I found a spare partition and put on a copy of Mandriva to 
give me the essentials, whilst washing the Suse cd set and continuing to 
try and install.

I now keep getting "DMA switched off" messages on boot and having 
reloaded Suse, it takes twice as long to boot as it is trying to access 
hdb as a linux formatted disc when it is fat32, despite my having tried 
to tell it how it is formatted.

I think there ought to be a moral here somewhere but 'steer well clear 
of windoze' is as good as any I can think of.

David