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.
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 Zinho on Thursday August 04 2016, @09:33PM
Hasn't this been the case for pretty much every version of windows, ever? Taking a quick look, I see that this behavior is documented in Microsoft's own knowledge base articles.
knowledgebase article 153762: [microsoft.com]
A Windows 95 installation is Windows NT-aware and does not overwrite NT boot loader information when you use this procedure.
In other words, unless your other operating system is WinNT, Win95 will blow away your partition table during install.
knowledgebase article 306559: [microsoft.com]
You have to install Windows XP only after installing MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Me to prevent these operating systems from overwriting the Windows XP boot sector and the Windows XP startup files.
In other words, 95/98/ME will blow away your XP partition as well, since they only recognize NT as a valid other operating system.
If I can't trust a windows install to not blow away other windows installs, how would I reasonably expect it to respect my Linux boot options?
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday August 05 2016, @05:09AM
I remember installing Win95 on a OS/2 system. At the end of the install it announced that the OS/2 install was now gone, no prior warning or anything. Fired up fdisk, changed the active partition back to bootmanager and booted back to OS/2. Same thing when I tried Win98. Win2k (service pack 3 IIRC) was actually nice enough to tell me how to change the default partition back to bootmanager though I understand that the first couple of releases of Win2k just nuked bootmanager by changing its partition type. Using bootmanager, it was fairly easy to have a multi-boot system, as long as you installed LILO/Grub on your Linux partition, ideally /boot, instead of the MBR.
Now while I was knowledgeable enough to use fdisk to fix the system, how many other people didn't have a backup and lost all their work. Arseholes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @07:17AM
No, they are talking about the boot manager. They always removed the boot manager, and getting it back was pretty simple, once you got the other OS booted.
This time they are talking about nuking the partitions. That means restoring the backup, rather than spending five minutes replacing the boot manager.
(Mind you, even Windows 95 COULD remove other partitions, if it did not like the partition table layout. But that would normally only happen on the first install (once Windows was installed, you knew the partition table was acceptable)).