This is anecdotal because it only happened once and I really don't want
to repeat the experiment (esp since it was the wife's machine ;)
Here's what we did:
1) Booted to the WinME partition and selected the inviting WindowsUpdate
link on the Start menu.
2) This launched explorer to a friendly Microsoft page listing the
updates we needed; chose the one highly recommended and no other
optional packs. This offered certificates, sent software and ran
through the updates, never explaining what was changed or why beyond
that first executive summary.
3) This required a reboot of Windows, so we did.
4) Noticed, long after explorer was shut down, frequent packets going out
to a microsoft page at akadns.net, so we shut down Windows to reboot
Mandrake 8.0
5) Mandrake boots to LILO screen, but selecting Linux halts on a
"cannot read HD error"
6) Booted the rescue image from the CD -- sure enough, the partition
table had been trashed; the swap partition was now "Extended" and the
Linux partition "unknown", and the sizes may have been changed. Fdisk
reported "extra content" at the end of /dev/hda5.
7) Tried using fdisk to put the partition types back to the right types
(although I can't be certain the sized hadn't changed because I didn't
record them from before) but this does not fix the problem; e2fsck
says one partition is 0-length and the other has bad superblocks.
Is there _anything_ we can do to protect against this sort of
malicious anti-competition attack? Can we write-protect the partition
table or back it up or otherwise prevent some "other" OS from
undermining our installation?
It's pretty bad news for Linux if we must tell dual-boot users that by
running Linux, they can never update their Windows partition.
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)
