Name My Rig!

[Newby]

Linux that gets out of my way and lets me do whatever I want.

Uh, that can go either way. It can "get out of your way" and handle everything and you can "do whatever [you] want" by surfing the web, watching porn, etc.

But I understood what you meant!

Give Gentoo a try.

[nslay]

It was the Linux installer's fault.  It should have asked you whether you wanted to modify the MBR or not.
The FreeBSD installer sucks (well it's not pretty), but it gives you the option to leave the MBR alone.  It didn't clobber my Windows boot loader and they coexist happily.  I'm sure most Linux distributions provide this option too.

Why Slackware?  You want to do hardcore development?  Gentoo is a pure developer's system.  All third party software is compiled so you can rely on all the headers and development tools being there ... and being where they're supposed to be!

Long story short: writing my linux partitions to my hard drive was what broke Windows. I know this because my linux install failed halfway throughout (before any MBR was touched) but Windows was corrupted at that point.

Re: Slack vs Gentoo .. familiarity, not having to compile everything from source, widely supported, etc. I'm not saying it's the best distro or the worst distro. It just works for me, and that's really all that I want. Linux that gets out of my way and lets me do whatever I want.

That's because you overwrote the MBR.  Don't overwrite the MBR!

Edit: Use Windows' boot loader to boot Linux (i.e. Don't overwrite the MBR!).  Look for EasyBCD.

[Sidoh]

Linux that gets out of my way and lets me do whatever I want.

Uh, that can go either way. It can "get out of your way" and handle everything and you can "do whatever [you] want" by surfing the web, watching porn, etc.

But I understood what you meant!

Give Gentoo a try.

I've heard good things about Gentoo, but I've also seen people border insanity while trying to install it.  My roommate last summer spent two days trying to get sound to work on his laptop.  I kept taunting him with an Ubuntu disk... he finally gave in and installed Fedora and said he had no regrets

I just don't understand the argument "gets out of my way."  What is it that some of the more friendly distributions do that you don't like (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, etc...)?  They work so well.

[deadly7]

Let me phrase it this way: in *any* other OS that I've used thus far (Ubuntu, Suse, BSD's) on a fresh install I have to do some tweaking to get to runlevel 3 (no GUI), have the applications I regularly use, and change the fstab/init.d to run "system essentials", so to speak.  Slackware just seems to set things up right for me when I've used it... I'm sure that, as Gentoo requires, having to jump through and vim every config file would greatly help my knowledge of Unix. But that's just a huge pain in the ass (not to mention I JUST reformatted both Windows and *nix onto this machine). If it "just works" why bother changing?

[deadly7]

That's because you overwrote the MBR.  Don't overwrite the MBR!

Edit: Use Windows' boot loader to boot Linux (i.e. Don't overwrite the MBR!).  Look for EasyBCD.

I assure you I'm not as stupid as you seem to think. The first thing I checked was the MBR -- even after rewriting [the unchanged version of] my MBR, Windows had unloaded the hard drive controller and simply would not accept one until I wiped my HD and started anew.

[nslay]

That's because you overwrote the MBR.  Don't overwrite the MBR!

Edit: Use Windows' boot loader to boot Linux (i.e. Don't overwrite the MBR!).  Look for EasyBCD.

I assure you I'm not as stupid as you seem to think. The first thing I checked was the MBR -- even after rewriting [the unchanged version of] my MBR, Windows had unloaded the hard drive controller and simply would not accept one until I wiped my HD and started anew.

I don't think you're stupid at all.  I don't know about GNU fdisk, but BSD fdisk can write the MBR.  Sounds to me like you accidently wrote over the MBR when you wrote the new partition table.
Another possibility is that you didn't set the Windows bootloader partition to the active partition.

[deadly7]

I don't think you're stupid at all.  I don't know about GNU fdisk, but BSD fdisk can write the MBR.  Sounds to me like you accidently wrote over the MBR when you wrote the new partition table.
Another possibility is that you didn't set the Windows bootloader partition to the active partition.

GNU fdisk does not, by default, write the MBR. I made plenty of changes to the partition table before Windows stopped working. Part of my issue in the final stage may have been that the CD I used was corrupted, so it may have claimed to write the partition table correctly but not actually have done so. I didn't get far enough through an install without having every process fail, so that's what I am suspecting happened. And then when Windows did not boot up, I jumped onto an Ubuntu livecd and used ms-sys to repair the Windows 7 MBR, but the SATA hard drive controller had been unloaded at that point. Even when I forced the driver, Windows did not recognize what I was doing. In the end, because it just made lots of sense, I reformatted everything. It works. Slackware is set up exactly as I would have a Gentoo system set up with none of the hassle (all the old stuff was kind of my fault), Windows works just fine with LILO, and life is good.