...goes well. I graduated from the University of Iowa last month with a B.S. in computer science and minor in physics. I want to stay in Iowa City through the summer, so I'm getting a local job. I'll likely just step up to a professional position at the hospital, since the job listings I've found sound horribly boring.
Microsoft
...sucks. Windows ate my Linux partition! I just found this KnowledgeBase article. It says that if you have more than one "primary" partition[*] and select any but the first to install to, Windows XP must also reformat all partitions before it. That's bad enough, but what the article doesn't say is that there are no prompts or warnings about this. It gave me the usual reformatting warning, but everything lead me to believe it was talking about its little area. When I booted up the Fedora rescue disk to put grub back (as Windows has always silently overwritten the MBR), I was shocked to discover that my Linux partition's type had changed to 0x07 (HPFS/NTFS) and e2fsck found nothing there. No valid magic number at the superblock or any of the backups. It wasn't just unbootable, it was gone.
Just to add insult to injury, it didn't install Windows XP properly, either. It saw the existing Windows 2000 partition on the primary slave (older) hard disk and used that as the "boot" volume (the one containing the NTLDR), again without asking me. In addition to making my drive letters quite weird (C: refers to the second drive and H: refers to the first drive), this means it doesn't boot when I remove the second drive. I need to do some trick in the recovery console to make it work.
If a Linux distribution had this bug, people would raise hell. How does Microsoft get away with this shit?
[*] - The partition table supports up to four partitions, which can be either "primary" or "extended". "Primary" partitions are the simple kind; "extended" ones are useless by themselves but can contain "logical" partitions. I think you should only have one extended partition. Only one partition should be "active" (the one the simple Windows MBR will try to boot) and it must be primary. Though it's actually stored as a boolean in each entry, IIRC, so you could have zero or more active. Who knows what Windows would do then. What a stupid scheme this is.
The actual partition layout:
Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytesDevice Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 9729 78148161 5 Extended /dev/hda2 * 9730 19457 78140160 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hda5 1 125 1003999+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/hda6 126 9729 77144098+ 83 Linux