[GLLUG] How do I switch back to windows XP (dual boot?) ?

[Jeremy Bowers]

Brian Hoort wrote:
> My experience mirrors Jo's.  I've never had Windows clobber the MBR.  I 
> have seen it once on a friend's PC, however.

Data point: I have a 40 or 60 GB drive in my main desktop machine that 
refuses to be a master, and it is now the only drive in that machine. 
Linux and the BIOS are happy with this; everybody uses /dev/hdb or (hd1) 
as the case may be and life is happy.

Windows used to be on /dev/hda, but that drive died and I never bothered 
replacing it.

Recently, we decided we wanted to install XP on it for various reasons. 
I stick the CD in, it boots, it does the first couple of steps, but 
where you'd normally say "Overwrite your old windows or make a new 
windows directory" or so, it decides that it can't understand a hard 
drive only on the slave part of the primary channel and bombs out the 
install.

It *does*, however, understand enough about the hard drive set up of the 
machine to toast the GRUB bootloader on that machine.

I will observe that the MBR overwriting code is more robust in this case 
then the installation code, but leave interpretation of that fact to 
ther reader.

(It is likely that different versions of Windows, and even different 
versions of Windows XP, do different things to the bootloaders. ISTR 
that NT or 2000 didn't kill the bootloader without asking because it was 
expected that it was likely that you'd install those versions on "real" 
computers (servers run by tech folks) that might have 9x, NT, and 
perhaps even SCO or Solaris for Intel on them.)