Jeremy Visser

Folks, if you’re thinking of setting up Windows Vista on your already-set-up Linux box, just follow these simple steps, and you’ll be sure to fail:

1. Firstly, make sure that you’ve already hit the “four maximum primary partitions” limit on your hard drive, so that backing up and repartitioning will be as painful as possible.
2. Make sure you install Linux first, as the first partition of the drive, to make it as difficult as possible to get Windows to install on a different partition. Oh, and it’ll mean you have to overwrite the bootsector that Windows overwrites. Fun.
3. Before you install, stuff your Linux drive with as many programs, videos, music, etc. as you can, so that it’s way too much to even backup, so that if anything goes wrong, you’ll lose all your data!
4. Make sure that the bootable flags are set on your Linux partitions, because Windows won’t install unless only its own partitions are bootable.
5. After installation, resize and move around the partitions several times to increase the chance of data corruption.
6. Replace the bootloader several times from within an Ubuntu live CD by using dd. With any luck, you’ll make a typo, and overwrite your partition table, making everything on your hard drive inaccessible.
7. Install Mac OS X on your PC just to make sure that it will stuff up your bootloader if you accidentally access the Startup Disk control panel which will try and install an EFI partition on your hard drive.

I encountered quite a few of these problems (although some are hypothetical) in the past month or so. No joke.