I like WinXP. It’s my OS of choice at this particular time. I have a lot of software that cost me a lot of $ that runs very nicely under XP.

But I like new toys, also, hence my desire to load a couple of Linux distros and play around.

Last night I managed to successfully load SuSE on my seondary drive! YEA! This was after multiple unsuccessful installs the previous night, so I was pretty happy when I saw KDE come up.

I also have Fedora and Mandrake lying around. So, since SuSE went so well, I decided to load Fedora.

It turns out there’s this “feature” in Fedora.

SuSE happily installed itself into the partition where I told it to go. No sweat.

Fedora offered to either wipe out all of my Linux partitions, or, if that wasn’t good enough, to wipe out every partition in my system. I told it no thanks, pointed it at a partition and told it to go there. I also told it to leave my MBR the heck alone and install it’s boot info in its own partition. Fedora wiped out all of my Linux partitions, including my SuSE install, in order to grab everything for itself. Along the way, it messed with the MBR on my master drive and “fixed” that drive’s partition table. Apparently XP sets up the disk geometry a little strangely, and Fedora helpfully changed it back to its own interpretation.

I’m lucky as hell that I was able to boot to XP at all post-Fedora install.

I’ve pulled Fedora off (and it will never blacken my disk again), and will spend this evening fixing my now-invalid partition table.

That has got to be one of the worst-behaved pieces of software I’ve ever had the displeasure to install. However XP set up the partition table, what the hell is it doing messing around with stuff that I told it to leave strictly alone? Regardless of how one feels or doesn’t feel about Microsoft, this kind of behavior is not OK from any software.

From poking around on the net, it appears that this is a general problem right now and also occurs with SuSE and Mandrake dual boots with XP. My SuSE install went OK because I told it where to install and it didn’t need to repartition the drive. Fedora didn’t need to repartition either — it just did anyway.