Nix and Doze co-existance (was: recovering FC3 from a bad superblock)

Benjamin Scott dragonhawk at iname.com
Tue May 24 00:12:01 EDT 2005


On May 18 at 11:23pm, aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net wrote:
>> Today, I've got Linux, Windows 98,
>>and Windows XP, all on the same disk, without problems.
>
> In theory, yes.  In reality, no so much.  Just try adding a little NT4 SP3 
> or 2K AS to your linux box.

   NT4 SP3 hosed itself just sitting there, so that's not really a Linux 
compatibility issue, per se.  ;-)

   When I was working at NTI, one of our testbed boxes was dual-booting between 
Win 2000 Adv Srvr and random Red Hat flavors.  As a testbed, it never really 
got hammered on by users, but by the same token, it got a lot of weird stuff 
done to it, and we never had any data loss problems.

> That's all it'll take to hose your beloved linux filesystems.

   I'm afraid I have to disagree.  In my experience, simply installing and 
running Doze size-by-side with Nix does not cause any spontaneous data loss. 
Do you have a specific symptom or failure mode, or even an apocryphal story 
about what happened to you one day?  :-)

> Obviously, you guys have a much higher tolerance for data loss than I do.

   In a word, no, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't make statements about how 
I practice my profession without solid evidence to back said statements up.

   Now, I'm not about to dual-boot Doze and Nix on a mission-critical 
production system for a major business or something like that.  But I wouldn't 
even dual-boot two releases of the same Linux distribution on a system like 
that.  That's basic configuration management and common sense.

> Simply the fact that you're running win anything means your system is more 
> likely to go nutz on you.

   Well, that really depends on what you're using it for and how you treat it.

> Additionally, there's nothing to stop win (any version) from accessing 
> (trashing, etc. fill in the blank with your favorite form of destuction) 
> your linux partitions if it so fancies.

   And there's nothing to stop Linux (any version) from .+ your Windoze 
partitions, either.

> To be fair, though, win9x does cohabitate *relatively* well with linux.

   Hmmm.  If I was going to live in fear of random Windows behavior, I'd be a 
lot more afraid of 9X then NT.  9X has basically no protection against wayward 
programs hosing the system.  You're always a privileged user.  In Nix terms, 
everything runs as "root", all the time.  That's a real bad way to run a 
system, regardless of OS.

   NT (and that includes 2000, XP, 2003, whatever-Microsoft-dreams-up-next) at 
least give you the *option* of properly securing the system.  With a great 
deal of effort.

> I'm not going to lecture y'all on the risks of running windoze on valuable 
> data.

   You already have.  :-)

-- 
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>



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