Bloody hell, drive alignment, I remember having to do that years ago with a large drive and XP. It really was years ago, because that's how old XP is!!! Stop using it.
Mainly for a backup mbr pointing to my bootloader. I touch it so rarely I have to dive into the rubbish tip that is my real desktop to find the boot floppy I made last September.
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"Giant pig hot air balloon crashes after tangling with a cowboy-shaped one"
I probably will be getting a legit copy sometime in the next 3-6 months, along with new components. At least I can cross a psu and hdd off the bottom line when it comes to that.
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"Giant pig hot air balloon crashes after tangling with a cowboy-shaped one"
I don't believe you. Not least because there are about a billion better ways to fix a fucked mbr than using a floppy which, by the time you need it again, is invariably de magnetised and useless.
OK, well you've probably had to to do this fewer times than me, and you won't ever need to do it again anyway.*
Trust me, it's the easiest way to hit a bootloader, boot into linux and restore the mbr after xp nuked it... if your mb is not usb-bootable, like mine.
Saves faffing around with tedious slow boot from a live disk, and chroots.
It's true the boot floppy could die in the meantime, but it's a doddle to recreate (best to test it first though).
*unless you need to resq gran's old pc. Oh wait, gran's vey unlikely to have a dual boot with linux. Never mind.
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"Giant pig hot air balloon crashes after tangling with a cowboy-shaped one"
On a proper computer I have never let myself do a single drive dual boot. I didn't trust any OS to live happily with another. I always used a totally separate drive and picked the drive to boot from at POST.
bastard by name