On Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 01:47:23PM -0800, Brian Buhrow wrote:
> That's when I concluded that the first sector of my Windows partition
> contained a dummy program to just print the error message shown and loop.
> A read of several howto's on how to make Linux and XP co-exist confirmed
> this theory.

Bah - you really can't trust Microsoft to get anything right!

That sounds as though they are sidstepping the 2 stage (mbr then pbr)
boot sequence if you are installing windows and assigning the entire
disk to it.
There may also be a question in the install where you can choose not
to overwrite the system boot code.
I have no problems using netbsd's mbr_bootsel to select a win2k system,
nor using grub's 'chainloader' to do it.  Both require boot code in the pbr.

FWIW if you look at a non-boot floppy formated by anuthing M$, you'll
see a whole load of code that typically contains 'Not a system disk'
and 'press any key to continue' or similar such texts.
Amazingly it fills the entire available space!

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk