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Some Windows Apps Make GRUB 2 Unbootable
KwahAG writes "Colin Watson, one of the Ubuntu developers, published in his blog information about Windows applications making GRUB 2 unbootable. Users of dual-boot Windows/Linux installations may face the problem, which boils down to particular Windows applications (Colin does not name them, but users point at least to HP ProtectTools, PC Angel, Adobe Flexnet) blindly overwriting hard disk content between the MBR and the first partition destroying information already stored there, in this particular case — the 'core image' of GRUB 2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) making the system unbootable."
A few years ago this would have been a much more fair question... now it's just troll/flamebait. I run as a limited user at both work and home, and for the most part it's installers and a couple other apps you'd expect which need admin rights.
(Even when Vista was new I kept a log of all the elevations I gave in a month or so, and with a couple exceptions (one of which has been since fixed and one of which was a stupid utility I didn't really need) they were basically on-par with what you'd need to 'sudo' to do in Linux.)
It makes sense for a bootloader to place data and code outside of partitioned space. It makes more sense to place the code inside a partition, even if it's a one-track partition dedicated to the bootloader. If they collided with components of Windows' bootloader or FreeBSD's bootloader, or some pre-boot hard disk encryption software I'd have little sympathy for them.
On the other hand, user-level apps storing data on the hard disk outside of partitioned space is very bad mojo. They should not be doing that. Ever. Period.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Got to say this isn't surprising at all. Windows has never favored the dual boot setup. In the mind of Microsoft, there product should be the only one to touch the drive and thats it. Personally I run 2 dual boot setups. 1 on my notebook and 1 on my desktop. The amount of times that Windows has chosen to just over write grub and leave me with no way to get into Linux is amazing. What Microsoft should do to show there a team player is put code into the install to detect a grub install and then append the correct entry into the grub file to setup the dual boot.
I know this will very likely never happen but it would be a good step to be taken by Microsoft.
Bingo. It is absolutely wrong to put data outside of partitioned space, and it is insane to blame something else for your own bug. Indeed, one security measure when installing a new system might be to zero out all unpartitioned space and then make sure nothing is ever written to it - Grub makes this impossible.
Grub should use an existing partition to store all the bits which don't fit inside the MBR, following the lead of EFI system partitions if necessary but supporting various common filesystems otherwise. Instead they use an atrocious hack to try to make things look neat.
There is a fairly strong convention there that userspace data goes in partitions and boot loaders low-level stuff go outside of partitions. The "unused" sectors on track 0 have long been considered as reserved for boot loader. It's even in the original specs.
Yeah, viruses use that space sometimes, but by nature a virus ignores boundaries anyway, DRM, that is, software that hides itself from the user and makes the computer malfunction (by not doing the owner's bidding) is just a special case of virus.
Does grub have any more reason to be there these other companies?
It does if I put it there. Nothing should be automatically written into partitioned space. Partitioning defines what areas of the disk I want to be automatically written to using whatever scheme I define by setting the partition type. Anything outside that, I'm free to manage any way I please. I can put a block-oriented FORTH program there if I like, individually managing "screen" loads and saves in the FORTH code. Or whatever. The point is, they're my blocks to do with as a like, and nothing should be written there except what I explicitly write there.
Among other things, it does mean that if I choose to write GRUB data there, it should be perfectly safe there. If it isn't, that's a serious bug in whatever program overwrote the unpartitioned block(s).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
OK, I can see AV software requiring raw disk access. I can't see why it would need to be able write to that section of the disk if there is no virus there.
Of the 3 programs listed, none are anti-virus. HP's software is for heavy duty keycard/usb dongle access to the computer - it might be trying to secure the bootstrap - however if that's what it's doing it should be replacing grub not just writing to the disk.
PC Angel is backup/recovery software ... WTF does it need raw disk access? It's not like your computer is accidentally going to be writing files outside the partition.
Adobe's netflex is their DRM. It's obvious why they want to write their information outside the partition - to make it harder to discover & alter - but I'll tell you that if I found a program doing that - I'd yank it off of any network I was running. You want to run on my networks, you color within the lines. I'm not wasting my time hunting down why a chunk of software is writing where it's going to be hard for my AV software to check it, I'm yanking it & tossing it in the trash.
Yeah, just a great idea to toss your proprietary code chunks into random places on the hard drive that 'nobody uses anyway'. It's a file system for a reason.
Unfortunately, the only company that's going to get any flak over this is Adobe. People are going to get work stations with the HP software installed & installing the netflex software will break it. Once that happens, Adobe will get called by "big important companies" and bitched at. HP & PC angel will merrily go on their way with only a few 'fringe crackpots' having an issue with their software.
The whole point behind VMs is to make the host as reliable and stable as possible and put the flakier OS and software in a VM so when it crashes and burns, all one has to do is start the VM, not try to rebuild file structures and apps from scratch. Your post suggests you're not quite clear on the concept.
Unless you honestly believe that "Son of Vista" is more reliable and stable than Linux. In which case, I recommend you get help from a competent mental health professional.
Tech Public Policy stuff
It makes sense for a bootloader to place data and code outside of partitioned space. It makes more sense to place the code inside a partition, even if it's a one-track partition dedicated to the bootloader.
It would, if you could actually get more than four partitions on a hard drive with the 90+% of BIOSes which can't boot properly from a GPT drive.
My new laptop came with _THREE_ recovery partitions and a Windows partition, so I had to delete one of the recovery partitions to be able to install Linux at all... where would I get another partition for Grub to run from without deleting all the recovery data?
So the big problem is that we're still stuck with shitty MS-DOS disk formats from the 1980s.
If it's wrong to put data outside of partitioned space, what are these user spaces apps doing writing there? I can see a pretty good case for boot loaders doing this (the comment below about the 4 partition limit is one). Why is a copyright/licensing program writing there (which is what Flexnet seems to be)?
What's to prevent one of these programs from overwriting the data another makes? How would you like it if every time you ran NewSuperGameWithDRM, Photoshop lost it's license and forced you to phone home to reconfirm it?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Or how about I continue to dual-boot, and use my PC the way I want to?
> Or how about I continue to dual-boot, and use my PC the way I want to?
You know the drill. Microsoft isn't going to cooperate with that. Now it seems so of their stooges will also "help".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Yea, article is somewhat trollish, all three apps listed are server apps, and who the fuck would dual boot a server?
In a "grown up" OS, the server apps don't run as Administrator.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... which is better than adding 3 lines to /boot/menu.list or /boot/grub.conf how?
I still see to fail why GRUB2 is a big deal (right now at least).
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Say no to any DRM'd shit!
Are you implying that GRUB, which is a bootloader, and whose code is available, is writing in the boot area in an undocumented fashion?
One would presume that a bootloader is supposed to write in the boot area. One is not likely to presume a userland app in a high level OS is writing in the boot area.
I failed to see what the big benefit of GRUB was in the first place. It adds a huge amount of complexity for standard Intel boxes, minimal benefits, and when it was first jammed into distros, regressed all sorts of use cases (such as booting from broken software RAIDs).
Much like the Linux audio subsystems, it's a tail of throwing out something that works for 90% of users, replacing it with something of dubious virtue, and then declaring the remaining problems too hard to solve and moving on to the Next Big Thing (GRUB 2 in this case), while giving you a pile of new and insane problems to deal with.