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

[aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net]

   From: Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at iname.com>
   Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 00:11:10 -0400 (EDT)

   > 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. 

Okay, so your a Linux fan AND a Windows fan.  There's nothing wrong
with that. <removes tongue from cheek>

*What I know* is that the day I discovered windoze was writing blocks
of 0xFE to random sectors of my reiserfs partition was the day I swore
of M$ forever.

At first, I didn't want to believe that windoze and linux couldn't
coexist peacefully.  After all, it would be nice to (correctly) think
that linux can do anything. :) But, trying to figure out what *I* did
to cause that problem, I was forced to finally accept one conclusion:
that running windoze and linux on the same computer, *anywhere* on
that computer, even on a separate controller (as I had done) is a risk
to data.  The conclusion, though disappointing, was unavoidable.

The lesson to be learned from that experience was pretty clear.

   > 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.

Any well-designed operating system will not autonomously hose (1)
itself or (2) any other OS installed on the machine.  Linux fits
this requirement.  Windoze does not.

Windoze will host (1) itself and/or (2) other OSs on the same box
without your knowledge.  Linux will only do that if you ask it to do
something like:

for i in /dev/hd* /dev/sd*; do dd if=/dev/zero of=$i & done

(Or you do something dumb like pull out the drive containing your root
fs while the system is running...)

      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.

In my experience, running win9x next to Linux has caused fewer problems
than running NT variants.

So THERE! ;^P