6 years, and I've learned?
April 7th, 2004 by HenI can’t believe I just made the same mistake I made on my very first Linux
installation 
I used Partition Magic [back then it was v1, now it’s 5 or something] to
blow away the Linux partition [gonna use VMWare] and didn’t restore the
master boot record first. Back then it was a SuSE 4(?) dual boot with Win 95. Now it’s SuSE 8.2 with XP. It might also have been whatever Red Hat existed at the same time. I know I played with both until SuSE won me over by simple virtue of having the X server work first.
Things are improved however. GRUB gives me a console to show me what an
idiot I am. LILO used to just hang at LI. Better however is that Windows
XP has a recovery mode on their disk, and I can hopefully type ‘FIXMBR’
and the old [now expanded to its original size] XP can take over.
It seems to have worked, though Partition Magic had a few errors attempting to resize the hard drive. I repeated this, and it didn”t even have to reboot this time, possibly the problem is that PM tries to do all the tasks while it’s rebooting and can’t do them all there.
Anyway. 6 years, and while I’ve not learned any better, Windows and Linux [in the form of GRUB] have.