Wirt writes:
> To add to Alfredo's comments, the Mac scans all mounted discs for a
> valid system, as he says. However, if you want to force which disc
> the Mac should boot from, not necessarily the first disc that it would
> otherwise find, all that you have to do is "hide" the FINDER in the
> system folders of the "wrong" discs by placing them inside new folders
> within those discs' system folders. This makes the discs on which this
> two-level file structure occur now non-bootable discs.
> Truly a spectacular design.

Last night in a feeble attempt to install an "alternate OS" on my
Win95 PC at home, I created a new FAT partition at the very end of
my second disk drive to hold the new OS (The reason I created it as
FAT is that stinking Partition Magic wouldn't let be set the Type of
the partition).

I then booted into Windows 95 which said to itself, "oh, look, a new
little partition way out at the end of the last disk.  Why I'll
assign it, let's see..., drive letter D!", thus rearranging the
disk names of 6 other logical partitions and my CDROM.

Windows then proceeded to destroy the Registry because all the software
couldn't deal with the fact that all the drive letters had spontaneously
changed.  Deleting the partition didn't help.  It was toast.  Both the
primary and backup registry files got chewed up.

Reinstalling Win95 over itself did not correct the problem.  I finally
renamed my WINDOWS directory and did a clean Win95 install.  Now I'm
reinstalling the 7GB of software that was on the machine.  None of the
files got lost mind you, it's just that none of the applications can
run now that they've lost their precious meta-data in the registry, and
the only way of recovering is to reinstall everything again.

Static meta-data like the Windows 95/NT registry has got to be one of
the most horrible, god-awful, evil, things invented by bastard programmers
from hell.

Death to Windows.  It's got to go.

G.