Linux always had this because it was designed as a server that could serve Macs, PCs, NeXT workstations, whatever.

Because of the GPL, Linux comes with all these utilities and you don't have to search for add-ons. Whenever someone makes an add-on for Linux, all the manufacturers put it on the next distribution.

On the subject of copying the old system, thinking back on it, when I got my Western Digital drive it came, as always, with a version of DLG, its partition and formatting programming. When I transferred Win98 to the new drive it gave me an error message that the partition wasn't big enough (even tho it was the same size). Then it did a sector by sector disk copy. So the Win98 master boot record was copied over.

The bogus error messages caused me a lot of tension but everything worked smoothly. FDISK cannot handle disks of significant size. DLG is free and it works.

Another item from a long time ago was I once tried to install Win95 on a D: drive. Theoretically that can be done. Actually it cannot. All the functions of Win95 were supposed to check the value of the environment parameter %WINDIR% but some of the Msft programmers cheated and just put in explicit "C:"s in. I know Win2K and higher can run from D:. I don't know how well Win98 can do it. But Win95 wants to be C:.

Another thing that creeped out a guy on these forums a couple years ago was that when Linux was installed Windows showed a partition with a size of zero. Some Dogbert type tried to give him advice on how to get rid of that phantom partition and I told him it was normal. The 0 length meant that Linux is formatted in such an alien way at such a low level that nothing in Windows or DOS can write anything there. So the partition is listed as having a size of zero.