alt Hacker NewsWhen I was a kid I got obsessed with Linux, but my family only had one PC in the living room. After an attempt to set up Windows/Linux dual boot where I messed up the partition table, my parents banned me from tinkering with it. Luckily I discovered Knoppix and other live distros, which allowed me to boot into a safe environment to play around in.
Replies
I remember also hosing the bootloader somehow on my first try of Linux, luckily my personal desktop so no collatoral damage!
After that I always had a CD wallet thing with copies of sysresccd and supergrubdisk and others (including I think an old knoppix cd from a linux magazine).
Knoppix LiveCD in 2004 was my very first try at Linux. The fear of HDD partitioning my parents' PC delayed me from installing Ubuntu Warty by a few months.
I imagine that there are hundreds of us with very similar stories! I absolutely banjaxed our Windows partition after installing Mandrake or Suse or something on more than one occasion. I learned a lot about Linux, but probably more about the importance of backups haha.