I have been running WinME, 2K with many update successfully, without it affecting my other partition. Have you been able to repro this at all? Maybe someone can chime in and let me know if I am just lucky.
>From: Gary Lawrence Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: Gary Lawrence Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: Mandrake Cooker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [Cooker] DANGER: WinME update may trash all non-Windows partitions
>Date: 09 May 2001 16:19:46 -0400
>
>
>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)
>
>
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