Does not seem true considering UEFI PC's are now flooding the market. A more logical explanation for PC's breaking with BIOS is that there hasn't been major advantages to UEFI over BIOS, compared to its massively increased complexity and bugs.
Of course there have been plenty of advantages. GPT/EFI have been in use plenty in the server side of life. It is only Microsoft's inability to break with the past in their consumer OSes that has dragged the misery that is MBR into the present. To me, MBR is an abomination as much as FAT12/16/32. A legacy of the early 1980s that was allowed to live far beyond its useful life.
What do onmac/XOM have to do with Apple's hybrid MBR decision?
At the time onmac/XOM demonstrated that BIOS could be emulated and XP could be installed on Intel Macs, Apple had to switch their position from: Running Windows is not supported to running Windows is supported with this somewhat non-standard method. Clearly the earlier position was "simpler", you can't do that except through VM software.
I agree with you that fdisk on OS X should warn you to use diskutil instead.
These boards are littered with these complaints, as are Apple's forums, users experiencing the famous line from Boot Camp Assistant that they need to repartition with a single partition and reformat, even though they already have only one single partition.
I've had similar problems with Partition Magic and the like in the DOS/Windows days, and dealt with them since the early 90s. Most of those tools also required you to reboot to DOS (or not the running OS) before you could resize. This is usually the source of the issues many have, and it is often resolved by running disk utility from another drive or from CD. The simple solution that is infallible is, and always has been, backup and restore the backup to the resized partition.
Indeed and points precisely to how flakey Boot Camp is.
I still place a fair amount of the blame on Windows (at least through W7, I have not had much experience with W8 so far) and its reliance on archaic technologies like BIOS/MBR/drive letters, etc...
For the record, I've had plenty of
Windows only boxes go belly up because I introduced a new drive or partition that changed the drive letter allocation and rendered it pretty much useless. It's just silly. I've also long since given up on trying to reliably run a multi-partition/multi-drive Windows install as too many things just don't respect them. Even if I created a "D:" partition and moved my user profile or the "Program Files" folders there, many installers would insist on writing to "C:" no matter what.
It would be SO much simpler if Windows 7 would officially support booting from external/removable media like any modern OS. Bootable backups. What a concept!
Most recently my W7/Ubuntu box had become un-bootable several times just by adding a non-system drive. The W7 repair wizard would take hours to repair it, but has rendered Ubuntu un-bootable. Real robust.
EDIT: Basically, my point is this. I ran DOS/Windows as my primary OS from 1988 to 2005, I've run many other OSes concurrently on those systems. In most cases throughout that time, Windows was generally the cause of the issues that I encountered. Even when I ran a mixed W2000 XP system for an extended period of time.
My Linux only boxes were rock solid, my Windows (one system only) boxes were generally rock solid. As soon as I tried to deviate from the default single C: drive model, and/or mix several OSes, danger ensued.
W7 is a fine OS, but given my experience, I will generally prefer to run it on a system with a single partition as large as it can be with any additional drives strictly reserved for data. I have it on my MB and MBP under Boot Camp for emergency use, but I will generally RDP to my desktop. I've resized my partitions and upgraded my hard disks without any issues or data loss.
For me Boot Camp has been no worse in terms of stability or finickiness than any other multi-partition, multi-OS Windows install I've ever had that didn't involve OS X.
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