On Wed, 9 May 2001, S B wrote:
> 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.
Did you have an extended partition with multiple partition types? That
seems to be a leading place where the problem has been observed.
>
> >From: Gary Lawrence Murphy
> >Reply-To: Gary Lawrence Murphy
> >To: Mandrake Cooker
> >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 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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>
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