Hi Folks,
Installation CDs and pre-installed O/S plus recovery disks.
I have always installed from a full O/S disk. My daughter and several of the outlaws have bought systems with pre-installed O/S and recovery disks (Tiny and Acer). Initially, these boxes had Win95. Recovery on these machines was in fact a reformat and copying of a 'mirror' image and not a full version. I upgraded my sys to Win 98 and eventually 98SE (do you think I'd admit to upgrading the outlaws?) Currently, because Photoshop CS demanded it W2K (which is absolutely with no exceptions they flakiest O/S I've used - and I started with CP/M! Fond memory says W3.11 was the best.
I now have two towers and two USB externals. The 'twin towers' each have two HDD. The reason for this is that initially a refusal to boot up and even acknowledge the presence of emergency repair disk in floppy drive or the installation CD in CD drive caused my local guru to pronounce the HDD dead. I bought and fitted new drive, reinstalled every thing and fitted (after setting jumpers) 'dead' drive as slave in the hopes of being able to recover data including a large number of scanned images. Lo and behold, the 'dead' drive was seen and all the data was there and could be accessed. So verily the dead drive was resurrected! The next time the 'C:' drive 'died' on me, it was another trip to PC World for another HDD and again installing and loading O/S. This time 'dead' drive went into one of those new fangled (at the time) external USB drive boxes where it remains. As I said - two boxes and now six HDDs later have lead me to believe that it is software (namely windoze) that is at fault, not the hardware! Possibly a viral infection could have caused it but who knows? Next failure will see a smaller drive installed as 'C:' as it will in fact only contain O/S and those programs that won't install anywhere else but C: Why smaller? It takes an age to scan for Virii or defrag big drives! Incidentally, the latest reformatting because windoze wouldn't boot resurrected a dormant Linux partition which the system labelled C: and windoze took itself off into a second partition it named F: I wonder how long before I have to repeat the exercise? Now come the question; with multiple hard drives installed, can Linux install and boot from a second hard drive D:? Having windoze and Linux in separate partitions on the same hard drive made me give up on Linux.
Reading these mails - your comments re operating/installing Linux is absolutely frightening. A 'simple' installation CD that injects Linux onto a hard drive and which comes up with a desktop 'just like windoze' (or Mac O/S) is all 99% of PC owners want. We don't want to know about command lines - just icons on the desktop just like the original Digital Research GUI that all other O/S desktops have copied!
Cheers,
BD.