[Sheflug] Windows Applications Making GRUB 2 Unbootable

[Richard Ibbotson <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom/2010/08/28

Colin Watson would like to hear from you.  .......

"  If you find that running Windows makes a GRUB 2-based system 
unbootable (Debian bug, Ubuntu bug), then I'd like to hear from you. 
This is a bug in which some proprietary Windows-based software 
overwrites particular sectors in the gap between the master boot 
record and the first partition, sometimes called the "embedding area". 
GRUB Legacy and GRUB 2 both normally use this part of the disk to 
store one of their key components: GRUB Legacy calls this component 
Stage 1.5, while GRUB 2 calls it the core image (comparison). However, 
Stage 1.5 is less useful than the core image (for example, the latter 
provides a rescue shell which can be used to recover from some 
problems), and is therefore rather smaller: somewhere around 10KB vs. 
24KB for the common case of ext[234] on plain block devices. It seems 
that the Windows-based software writes to a sector which is after the 
end of Stage 1.5, but before the end of the core image. This is why 
the problem appears to be new with GRUB 2. "

e-mail address on the page above.

-- 
Richard
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