:S I saw this over at The Inquirer and wonder if it's true or not. When you install the XP upgrade package it overwrites the Master Boot Record to ensure that you point to the boot partition.
Of course, that's where you already are, because you're running from it. By doing so, XP effectively kills your boot manager.
Does this matter? Well the partition is important.
One of The Inquirer readers yesterday downloaded Linux Mandrake 8.1 and used a box running an eval of WinXP home.
Mandrake in its new rev gives an option to resize the current partition to make room for Linux in the free space.
XP doesn't seem to want to play this game, and gives messages saying the partition can't be resized.
In our readers' case, there was over 2GB of a 4GB hard drive unused - the partition was formatter to FAT 32 and XP ended up being deleted because this was the only way to install Linux.
He suggests that Microsoft intentionally does this so that other OSes cannot co-exist. Surely that can't be true?
News source: The Inquirer - Windows XP wants your hard drive partitions
