[mdlug] Alienware doesn't support boot from CD?

[Robert Adkins]

> 
> 
> > We have an older 500 GB external hard disk
> 
> My SUSE Linux wouldn't recognize my USB HD until it had been 
> "safely ejected" from the windows box.
> 
> Jay ~meow!~ 
> 

  This is truth.

  That's because the Windows NTFS writes a "mounted" message somewhere on
the file system and doesn't remove that until the file system is unmounted.
You can "force" Linux to mount such a flagged drive, but that isn't rxactly
the safest thing to do.

  Anyway, this is why you need to use the "Remove Hardware" feature on
Windows before unplugging USB memsticks and external Hard Drives, unless
Windows has completed the shutdown process. 

  Well that and (as I understand it) Microsoft did a wonderful "trick" that
makes it seem like Windows has completed copying files from one location to
another a little bit faster by using some write-cache code. So, while it
says that it has completed copying files to that USB stick, until you
"unmount" it, the last few bytes of the files could be floating in memory
waiting to be written to the device when the PC isn't otherwise occupied.

  -Rob