[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > If i download this program do i risk crashing windows?
Not sure what you mean by "this program". Downloading programs, etc, in and of itself, should not crash Microsoft Windows. Yet we all know that Windows can crash at the simplest things, so that's no guarantee. I think what you mean is: "If I install Debian GNU/Linux, do I risk losing Windows?" This is a complex question. As a general rule, when you install another OS, you need a separate partition or drive to do so. Since Windows typically sets aside the entire hard drive for its own partition, there's no room for another OS. If you have a second hard drive, this reduces any risk considerably. If you don't have a second hard drive, you'll have to repartition your drive, which is fraught with risk. There are (relatively) safe ways of doing this, but suffice it to say that a second hard drive is the safest (and easiest) method. (You could also install a version of Linux that rides on top of the Windows partition, but that's a half-way solution, and you won't be happy with it.) Assuming you have a second hard drive (or partition - for example, if you have an 8 GB drive and it's FAT16 formatted and therefore you have C:, D:, E:, and F: drives, each 2GB, and one of them's empty, you could use it), your risk of hosing MS-Windows is fairly low. If during the installation you decide to not use LILO, but to use a boot floppy instead, in order to boot into Linux, your risk of corrupting MS-Windows is almost non-existent. Nonetheless, things can go wrong. A flakey disk controller can work just well enough to work with one file system, but can sling bits when trying to work with two disparate file systems. Or a power outage half-way through the install can corrupt the partition table. Or etc etc etc. But to answer the spirit of your question (or at least what I perceive to be the spirit of what I perceive to be your question), no, the risk of hosing MS-Windows is no greater than the risk of installing the newest Internet Explorer, and in my experience, has less chance of damaging your setup than installing IE has.
