I’m reinstalling my operating system. I should say systemS, since I’m going to be triple booting. I used to dual boot Linux and Windows 2000, with Linux as primary, until my university presented me with a Microsoft-only interface to their online-eviron. Shortly thereafter, Windows went down, took the hard drive with it, and I didn’t have time (doing a Masters Degree and work simultaneously) to do anything but get Windows back.
- Image via Wikipedia
That’s the ugliness of Windows. I used to run it *inside* of OS/2 in the old days. I ran Windows software through Wine in Linux. When the primary OS is something other than Windows, and Windows crashes, it doesn’t take you with it. It’s when you’re “in” Windows that the fun occurs.
So I’m going to Ubuntu Linux, and decided that, for similar reasons, I’d never gone back to DOS when I wanted to, and I’m tackling that at the same time. I now have a 500meg DOS partition flying high, and am about to add Windows XP-SP3 and then Ubuntu, and triple boot.
Technie Note: For anyone else who tries this: if you get a message in DOS or DOS FDISK: “no fixed disks present” or else DOS just won’t boot, not even off the floppy - save yourself some time: DOS won’t run if there’s a logical NTFS partition (NTFS in an extended partition) anywhere on any connected hard drive. Turn them into primaries, like I did, or convert them all to FAT32. I spent an entire day figuring this out.
Update 11/23/2010: I still have DOS on a partition, but I haven’t used it once. I didn’t really expect to – I just thought it would be fun. But it’s not hurting anything sitting there. Ubuntu got canned. I love it – I really do – but honestly I need all my funky drivers to work. And at the time, I was running wifi. Wifi is the big weakness. Sound is still iffy, but wifi is hugely a problem. I dumped it. Went to [Windows 7]. But I will go back to Linux when Google is running it (Google’s forthcoming OS will be Linux-based). There’s no way I’m not dual-booting it for a while, but when I can switch completely, you can bet this Google kid is going lock stock and three smoking barrels.
Experiment….. I’d say the DOS part is a success – no problems there. The XP SP3 is the most dead simple OS I’ve used. So that was a success – Windows 7 really threw some hitches at me that XP doesn’t. Linux took a dive though – not permanently, it’s just knocked out right now. Let’s do it this way:
Experiment: Partial Success
