On 6/8/2012 7:47 PM PT, Paul typed:

To give an example of the strange things that can happen,
consider my Win2K install attempt yesterday.

The disk had a single primary partition, with C: containing Win2K.

I wanted to install a second copy of the OS, clean, with no CODECs
in it. So I could reproduce a problem with "dvdplay.exe".

When I went to install, instead of making a new complete partition,
marking it active, the installer decided instead, to keep the existing
C: as the "boot" solution. So the first partition remained the one
with the active boot flag. The OS installed into a second partition,
with the letter "E:". So my new install wasn't on C:. The first partition
handles the boot duties. The second partition doesn't have a
complete set of files either. The pagefile and hiberfil are on
the first partition. Quite possibly the boot.ini is as well.

This made things annoying when installing drivers, because I'd have to
remember that my new partition was E: and not C:.

The installer also made the second partition, a "logical" partition
in an extended. So the partition table had a FAT32 primary partition
for the original C:, plus an extended in which a single logical partition
E: was located. I could undo that with Partition Magic, without
breaking anything. But I stopped there, and didn't attempt to make
the second partition the booting partition. Wasn't worth the trouble,
and I was afraid of messing up a partition drive letter dependency
along the way.

So all sorts of things can happen when you do an install, and
what happened there, wasn't what I wanted at all. But since that
wasn't a long term setup, it won't be around to annoy me for much
longer. And it didn't break the original C:, which still works.

Ugh, how annoying.
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