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TurboTax DRM Writes to Your Boot Sector?!

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday February 16, 2003 @05:08AM from the now-that-ain't-cool dept.

ltwally writes "As reported on Slashdot (amongst other sites) recently, the latest version of TurboTax is laden with DRM software. Even worse, however, is that it apparently writes to your hard drive's boot-sector , as reported at Extreme Tech here. As I'm sure most Slashdotters already know, the boot-sector is often times used for silly things like boot-loaders and such. "

2 of 733 comments (clear)

Re:How Appropriate by groke · 2003-02-16 05:23 · Score: 0, Troll

... you fight like a cow
Re:How Appropriate by SN74S181 · 2003-02-16 11:05 · Score: 0, Troll

It's good practice to have the line

C:\windows\command\fdisk /mbr

in your autoexec.bat file if you run a Windows machine. Its especially important if you run a dual boot system likely to be infested with the LILO boot sector virus.

If you're running a dual boot system right now and in the Linux system, I recommend you mount your Windows partition and edit your autoexec.bat file right now to make this correction.

You'll thank yourself when on the next boot up of your system you've gotten rid of a viral infection that was likely tying up a big chunk of your hard drive space. Make sure you then run fdisk in interative mode to delete big blocks of worthless partition space that the viral infection was filling up on your drive (called 'non-DOS partitions' by Fdisk) and turn it back into useful space for your Windows system.