Re: Ready to join the club..

[Antony Gelberg <antony@wayforth.co.uk>]

Marty wrote:
> Antony Gelberg wrote:
> 
>> He is new to Debian but sounds like he has a decent understanding of
>> PCs.  If he is stupid enough to delete his Windows partition during the
>> install, it will certainly be the kind of mistake he learns from.  :)
>>
>> d-i is very friendly and I think he should proceed with both drives
>> connected.
> 
> 
> Easy enough to say when somebody else's data is at risk, and the
> friendliness
> of all the strangers in the world may not be enough to recover his lost
> data.

Not having backups is also the kind of mistake that one learns from.

> Moreover the reference to stupidity doesn't seem to cover the
> possibility of
> bugs or poor design in the installation routine, which could cause or
> contribute
> to catastrophic data loss.

I look forward to your evidence that data loss on another disk may be
caused by d-i when the correct disk (or partition) is seleected for
installation.

>>> Furthermore since you are using separate hard drives, you can probably
>>> select the boot drive using the BIOS boot device selection menu (e.g.
>>> F8->Boot Menu)
>>> available on newer motherboards.  There is probably no need in your
>>> case to use a boot loader for OS selection.
>>
>>
>> Talk about making an inelegant solution (dual-booting) even more so.
>>
>>
> 
> Elegance is in the eye of the beholder.  To me, such redundancy does not
> seem
> elegant in the least, just a source of additional complexity and modes
> of failure.

Again, I look forward to evidence of these problems when the correct
install options are chosen.  Thousands of people have dual-boot systems
with no problems at all.  When there are problems, they tend to be
boot-loader misconfiguration, and do not lead to data loss.