[plug] Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!

[Brad Campbell]

Bloody Windows 95!

I have a "Spare" machine that gets used as my general workhorse. It has a 40GB drive with a 20GB 
Linux Partition on it.
I decided I needed a small Win95 and Win2000 Partition to do some software testing, so I used the 
DOS based Fdisk to create the additional partitions. It asked all the right questions and appeared 
to do all the right things. Formated and installed fine.

Back in Linux I started to get ext3 errors, so I fired up Linux fdisk to find that DOS had created 
the Win95 partition starting right in the middle of my Linux partition!.

Bugger.

The other bastard is this machine has no internal Floppy or CDROM, and Windows won't install of a 
USB connected Cdrom!

I have had fun getting a USB2 cdrom to work in DOS. It does work 90% of the time though.

Oh well, re-format and re-install.
It's been years since I have done a clean Debian install. Perhaps it's time to try out the new 
installer.

While I'm here, does anyone know a sure fire way to kill a hard disk that does not involve physical 
damage? I have a Maxtor Maxline-II 250GB that is slowly growing bad sectors. I can't use it in my 
RAID as I can't rely on the disk, but it is not yet bad enough to RMA so I need to coax it to get 
worse in a hurry to be able to RMA the disk. I figured I might just leave my machine on doing 
constant badblock -n cycles, which should just exercise it to death (that seems to make the bad 
blocks grow faster anyway). I guess I could cook it, but I just have a problem with doing it that way.

Frustrated in Dubai.
Brad