Ok, so it wasn’t THAT bad. Lets get into some backstory…
My mother wanted to get a scanner so that she could make all of her pictures into ones and zeroes. I started looking around for something that would work for her needs and couldn’t find anything that would work with SANE. Go figure.
Ok, sidenote. Seriously. If CUPS can give support to damn near anything that prints since probably the 1950′s, why can’t SANE do something at least somewhere near that?!
I decided that since there wasn’t any simple way, short of writing a driver for the new scanner *cough*, that I could make this work with Fedora 10 in the timeframe I was working with.
So I get the new XP license in the mail today. I double check that the backups are done on her system. I put the CD in and reboot. I get the almighty Black Screen of Insanity +5. As you can imagine, I am getting a little bit pissed by now. I reboot real quick and jump into the BIOS to make sure that there isn’t anything odd looking in there. Nothing odd. Reboot and try to install again. No go again.
In the past, I had the same problem with a system that previously had Fedora Core 4 on it. Microsoft seems to want to make us jump through hoops if we are forced to go back to their stupid OS for any reason.
Come to find out, this is a partitioning issue. I guess that Microsoft doesn’t know how to read a partition table if it was written by another OS. Somehow, my jaded nature just doubled.
The solution was to rewrite the partition table with GParted. I downloaded the ISO from the GParted website and burned it using another system. After inserting the CD and booting from it, I was able to completely erase the partition table. A quick reboot from there, and Windows XP decided that it wanted to start working.
The moral of this story is very simple. Microsoft has been trying to find ways to keep ahead of Apple and the Linux community for years. They have done some good things and a load of bad things. The problem is, they have continued to write shoddy software. Their market share is slowly seeping over to the *NIX side of things, and they still fail.
Windows 7 may be able to turn this trend around, but what I have seen suggests that they are simply stealing ideas from the Linux community to rewrite and impliment in their own OS. Eventually, I believe this will catch up with them.