I have seen similar comments on the kernel list.
For that reason and others (the heavy handed copy protection, for one), I
will not install Me on any system I own.
When I install Windows it is on a seperate removable disk drive.
On 9 May 2001, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:
>
> 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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