Linucks and windoze

I have an interesting combination of OSs available to me now: Mandriva 2008 and Sabayon on one hard drive, XP on the other.

In the process of installation I've discovered that:

Sabayons disc partitioning system is stinky and ambiguous.

Mandrivas partitioning system will only operate if the partition you want to resize isn't actually being used by any part of the OS

Sabayon appears to not offer an equivalent level of control through the GUI to Mandrivas control panel

Mandriva is unstable and unpredictable

Setting up a bootloader that can cope with different HDD formats (Linux on IDE, windows on SATA) is 'tricky' despite being apparently obvious.

Chris thought Mandriva was pronounced "Man Driver" - the white van man of the OS world?

So at the moment I swap between OSs by disabling the IDE drive in the BIOS - there appears to be a boot hierarchy, with IDE before SATA. Fine by me, but a little irritating. I suspect 30s in google and a couple of hours reading and fiddling will fix it fine. My biggest irritation about Linux is that it is highly un-intuitive unless you already know all kinds of stuff, while *mostly* windows is very intuitive and noob-friendly. Sure there are exceptions (no-one ever tells people who to enter the MAC address of a wireless dongle so that the base station will recognise it).

Now I need to go recover all my various passwords so that I can start accessing things through the new OSs. I DEFINITELY don't remember what my blogger password is.