SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Windows 10 Anniversary Update Borks Dual-Boot Partitions
The Windows 10 anniversary may interfere with, affect and even delete other partitions on the same disk. http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/08/windows-10-anniversary-update-delete-partition
It seems that the latest version of Microsoft's OS has attention issues. Not content with forcing itself on users who didn't want it, it may be taking even more drastic steps of hosing other operating systems entirely!
A handful of reports surfacing on social media suggest, anecdotally, that the Windows 10 anniversary may interfere with, affect and even delete other partitions on the same disk.
If these claims are accurate —and do keep in mind that various different factors may be at play in these cases — it would be a pretty shocking situation.
Classic Shell, Audacity downloads infected with classic MBR nuke nasty
http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/04/classicshell_audicity_infection/
Classic Shell and Audacity downloads were booby-trapped with an old-school software nasty this week that knackered victims' Windows PCs.
Hackers were able to inject some retro-malware into the popular applications' installers hosted on fosshub.com, an official home for Classic Shell and Audacity releases among other software projects.
When victims fetched the tainted downloads and ran them, rather than install the expected app, the computer's Master Boot Record (MBR) was replaced with code that, during the next reboot or power on, displayed a cheeky message and prevented the machine from starting up properly. The drive's partition table was also likely damaged.
We thought these sorts of shenanigans died in the 1980s or early 1990s. In order for this to work, the victim would have to click through a warning that the download was not legit
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:36PM
Boot, and everything around it, is extremely tricky. If you've ever tried to configure a bootloader by hand, you've probably made a mistake like this at least once. It's gotten easier with UEFI, but TFA is light on details so I have no idea what their system configuration was.
Remember that Microsoft's mass layoffs in 2014 hit their testing team, with the idea being that the developers (coupled with shitloads of telemetry) would be sufficient. So, yes, it's likely that whoever wrote this code didn't think to test dual boot (or didn't think that their changes would effect it), and now that there's less redundancy they didn't get slapped around because of their mistake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @09:43PM
Yeah, that is about what I was guessing.
Low QA with high 'nah that wont do anything' and to large of confidence in auto testing.
A crap QA dude is not worth shit. A QA dude who knows their craft is amazing. I personally like to get dudes from the aircraft and auto industry. They are *really* good at catching things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @09:15AM
Will a quarterly-return obsessed MBA tolerate an attentive QC guy?
My observations have been that a good QC guy interferes with immediate cash flow and would be considered first to lay off to improve this quarter's cash flow.
(Score: 4, Informative) by gawdonblue on Friday August 05 2016, @07:54AM
Boot, and everything around it, is extremely tricky. If you've ever tried to configure a bootloader by hand, you've probably made a mistake like this at least once. It's gotten easier with UEFI, but TFA is light on details so I have no idea what their system configuration was.
It's not just the MBR, whole partitions are being deleted if they're on the same disk. That's extra hard to do unintentionally.