Journal xonen's Journal: MSWX update destroys dual boot and deletes partitions. 1
My anti-love for our friends in Redmond has just grown by another order of magnitude today.
Not only did it decide, without asking, if i wanted to run the update now - ignoring any settings regarding updates.
It automatically did so, and left my entire system in an unbootable state.
Inspection showed it not only screwed up the MBR or overwrite it with NT loader (it actually failed to install a bootloader even for the windows partition). It also removed the ID's from it's own NTFS filesystem, letting Grub2 list it as 'msdos/unknown'.
Worst of all, it decided that the ext4fs in the extended partition space was useless, and just wiped this entire partition from the partition table.
Cheers. It left my PC ultimately de-functional. And, having an SSD installed i did not have significant hope of recovering my Mint installation.
Little googling on smartphone learned me this problem is anything but new, and similar issues seem to exist since windows 8.
This lets me believe that this is not a glitch. It also makes it obvious that either the quality control of MS is a big big mess, either this act of sabotage is done purposely. Come on, since windows 8.0 and a million hits on Google, this is an obvious issue and an obvious error.
Besides, destroying the boot loader i could see as accident or glitch. But purposely deleting a partition? That can only be done on purpose.
Another thing that bugs me is - this was just a maintenance install. Not a fresh install of windows or whatever 'normal' event a human could consider as the right time to make a proper backup before letting an black-box installer toying around with the file-system. This was an installation aggressively pushed by Redmond _and_ it fucked up.
Anyways, fortunate for me others made it easy to fix both issues. Grub2 documentation happily points to a live CD 'supergrub2disk' that can fix the boot issue. But before doing that, i wanted to try recover my partition. fdisk, gparted and parted showed empty space. Parted's 'rescue' command stay silence in all dimensions, despite giving it sector-accurate info. The tool 'testdisk' eventually was able to recover it nicely in the blink of an eye.
So.. Lessons learned today - always keep a boot disk at hand, don't throw them away after installation - sorry for that bad habit, but the occasional times i install linux on my desktop we're years and many major releases further.
Second lesson was how to use some tools. And it's amazing that the community actually has great working tools to recover even from errors created by this buggy software called MS windows.
Third lesson, about time to copy some data and delete this dangerous windows installation entirely from my SSD. Not only do i hardly use it, even when i do _not_ use windows it manages to destroy my data and make me spend hours of work not the way i planned to spend them.
You have been warned if you dual-boot installation: Microsoft Windows - Not an OS but a computer destroy system.
Any response from Microsoft? (Score:2)
And is there any response from Microsoft or is it just expected that they will come back with "you should have made a backup first"?
In any case I fully understand the frustration in this case, M$ assumes that their OS is the only OS that is permitted to exist on a computer.