Fun story: I was trying to get Windows 8 and Linux Mint to dual boot before Christmas, and to use the Windows 8 bootloader (what can I say, it's pretty). Now, t

Fun story: I was trying to get Windows 8 and Linux Mint to dual boot before Christmas, and to use the Windows 8 bootloader (what can I say, it's pretty). Now, the Windows 8 bootloader is a mini-OS itself, containing a fairly sophisticated recovery environment; as such, it needs its own NTFS-formatted partition. Now (and this took me about half a dozen re-installs of Windows and Linux to figure out) if you install Windows 8 on the first partition of your hard drive, it will create a small bootloader partition in front of the Windows partition, and everything will be great. If, however, you install it after say, your Linux partition, the Windows installer will say "oh, look, a big partition for me to dump my bootloader, I don't understand what's on it, so it can't be important", and re-format your ext Linux partition as NTFS (then, when you go back and re-install Linux, Windows is of course unbootable, because you overwrote its bootloader, so even the option of "okay, let's just stick to GRUB" doesn't work). I understand Microsoft not supporting alternative OS's in their bootloader, that's their prerogative, but destructive (and un-warned) reformats of existing partitions as part of the installer? That's just unprofessional.