Don’t get me wrong … I haven’t turned my back on the Penguin. Far from it.
All I wanted to do was to re-install one of my machines at home, and as much as I have been toying with the idea of trying to go completely Windows-free on the next re-install, I decided against it. I still have a few USB gadgets that I haven’t had the time to figure out how to get working under Linux, so I am going for dual-boot again. Easiest thing in the world. Yeah, right …
The box I was setting up had a hard disk that I had used a while back on a linux media-recorder project.The disk had an Ext3, a swap and a XFS partition on it. Now, I am ready to scratch it and put NTFS on it, so I pop in the installer disk, and want to install Windows. Only it doesn’t work at all. After a first message that setup is screening my hardware, the screen turns blank and I wait for a really long time. After exchanging or unplugging all peripherals but the graphics card, mouse and keyboard, I finally figure out what went wrong: Windows can’t handle Linux-formatted hard disk partitions! I boot Knoppix from DVD and quickly wipe the disk’s partition table with cfdisk.
Finally, Windows is happy and lets me install the XP Home I bought with that computer. Frankly, I am surprised. There’s Knoppix, an ambitious one-man show run by Klaus Knopper, churning out DVDs and CDs that boot on nearly every x86 box out there, and dropping you into an amazingly functional Linux desktop in a matter of minutes.
On the other hand, there’s Windows, developed and tested by a gazillion employees (actual numbers may vary. Closed road, professional driver. etc.). And yet, it stumbles and falls on something that could be as easy as “Windows has detected partitions on the hard disk that cannot be read by this operating system. How would you like to proceed?”. Even worse, I get a black screen with no way of finding out what has even gone wrong. Why don’t they make life easier for those who want to “switch” to XP? Does this work better with Vista?
I am puzzled…
