The XP was probably expecting some sought of OEM setup ... where that would have been all done by the retailer.

MS figure the more in the dark the customer is the better it is for them. An just one of the many insideous aspects of that company.

>>
I read somewhere that it doesn't look to the BIOS to find out the correct hard drive settings.
>>

Yes, Lilo/Grub use their own mappings. And if there installed on the mater boot sector, the bios will just load those first-stages and they take over from there.

It means they will be dependant on a viable Linux root somewhere though, to fetch their second-stages from. Hard to get around that one though (grin).

I'm not a great fan of Grub/Lilo mbr installs though. People tend to forget it's there. And if they ever uninstall their Linux, they often forget to reinstall a generic bootstrap to their mbr ... result ... no windows (grin)


jm