If you intend to not use boot disks all the time then it is. Most BIOSes can't boot on a partition beyond the 1023rd cylender. What most people do is just make a small (~50 meg) /boot partition at the ...

Using Partition Magic 8.0 I deleted 2 Linux partitions I had on my primary hard disk, they were ext3 and Swap. I then created NTFS partitions in their spaces and merged them with my Windows partition.

Windows can and will crash — and after it does it may not boot normally. To be prepared for worst-case scenarios, learn how to create a bootable recovery partition on your system drive. From time to ...

https://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,74365/description.html (free) has been my go-to Linux boot disc since I first downloaded it several years ago. Not only ...