An actual suggestion, believe it or not.

[valczir]

Has anyone dual booted Windows and Linux? If you have, have you ever tried to reformat the Windows partition and reinstall Windows without doing the same for linux? It's annoying. First off, most users don't know how to (the only reason I do is I did the whole manual gentoo install thing), and second, it requires booting into a recovery live-cd and running a grub install script (at least, in gentoo).

Know what would be a sweet feature? If, at the boot prompt, the install cd had an option to just install GRUB back to the MBR, writing over Windows' attempt at being hard drive nazi. The script could prompt for, or even give a listing of, the root partition of the system to be restored. Then, it could (attempt to) mount all points in fstab and do whatever needs to be done to install GRUB (in gentoo, it would be to run the command "grub-install <device>", but I'm not sure if that'd work in others). If you're lucky, it could work for other systems, as well (gentoo, debian, ubuntu, ...).

It's just something I've always hated - fixing everything after a Windows reinstall. We all know Windows deteriorates over time, and a reformat is actually recommended about once per month, or once every few if the HD is defragged often. But linux does not, or at least not as quickly. So if you're dual booting with Windows on one partition, you have to reinstall linux far more often than you would have to normally. Setting up everything as you had it is not very fun, and is quite time consuming. It's bad enough having to do it for just Windows, but having to do it for linux, as well, ...that just gets annoying. Something that'd allow you to only have to do it for Windows would be really nice.

Of course, this assumes that you have some install script. If you're like gentoo, and everything is done manually, then that whole thing is kinda pointless.

-Valc

[sofar]

believe it or not but lilo is actually better at this: you boot the cd's kernel but use the installed linux system at the cd's boot prompt: