I've been seeing a lot of posts about dual-booting Linux and Windows.
I haven't been paying much attention, though. First of all, I've
heard enough horror stories to make me think that dual-booting is
more trouble than it's worth. Second, I'm concerned about the
security of a dual-booting system. After all, any OS (at least
when not in a virtual machine) has access to the entire drive;
I like to think of partitions as a convention that most operating
systems are courteous enough to respect.

However, given Microsoft's reputation for not playing nicely with
others (e.g. Windows' tendency to stomp on the MBR in a dual-boot
setup), I think I'm justified in being a bit paranoid about whether
Windows, when booted, can be trusted to leave Linux partitions
alone. Windows has already been caught snooping on users' files
and reporting the results back to Big Brother Bill, and I can see
no technical (or, in their case, moral) reason why Windows wouldn't
spy on Linux partitions given the opportunity.

Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?
I don't know whether anything would let me come any closer than
swappable hard drives, but I'd be interested in what any of you
have to say.

--
/~\ cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
> I've been seeing a lot of posts about dual-booting Linux and Windows.
> I haven't been paying much attention, though. First of all, I've
> heard enough horror stories to make me think that dual-booting is
> more trouble than it's worth.

I'm not the sort of poster you invited responses from, but: I agree.

> However, given Microsoft's reputation for not playing nicely with
> others (e.g. Windows' tendency to stomp on the MBR in a dual-boot
> setup), I think I'm justified in being a bit paranoid about whether
> Windows, when booted, can be trusted to leave Linux partitions
> alone.

There have been reasonably reliable reports, over the years, of
MS-Windows clobbering Linux partitions. However, that's likely to be
ineptitude rather than malice. As to "snooping on users' files" inside
native-Linux filesystems, I rather doubt that. The code to do so would
be pretty conspicuous, and also word would leak out, causing them a
horrendous security problem for very little gain.

> Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?

Me, I go out of my way to have exactly _one_ boot regime (one bootloader,
one operating system, usually more than one kernel) per machine. If I
had an MS-Windows box, it would be separate, reachable via VNC from my
Linux desktop if/when I needed to run something Win32-ish. Life is a
lot simpler, that way.

The main situation where people have little alternative but to dual-boot
(or use Win4Lin/VMware) concerns laptops.

On 29 Sep 05 17:33:10 -0800, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> I've been seeing a lot of posts about dual-booting Linux and Windows.
> I haven't been paying much attention, though. First of all, I've
> heard enough horror stories to make me think that dual-booting is
> more trouble than it's worth.

I have no problem with it. I have see lots of those _problems_ and
lots have been user induced when they fear for that other OS and move
cables, change booting options and whatnot in the bios.


> Second, I'm concerned about the security of a dual-booting system.

If running MS then you have to be concerned about security, _period_.
reality wheither it is dual boot or not.

> After all, any OS (at least
> when not in a virtual machine) has access to the entire drive;

When you load malware nothing is safe regardless if the OS cannot
_read it_.

> I like to think of partitions as a convention that most operating
> systems are courteous enough to respect.

When code is written with the idea that you use the OS's disk tools
and no other OS exists or will exist, then there is no reason to
assume there is anything to be courteous about.

> However, given Microsoft's reputation for not playing nicely with
> others (e.g. Windows' tendency to stomp on the MBR in a dual-boot
> setup), I think I'm justified in being a bit paranoid about whether
> Windows, when booted, can be trusted to leave Linux partitions
> alone.

Well, having been there and seen M$ dinkup my linux partition. I can
make a reasonable guess how it happened. Especially since I went back,
changed how I installed and the problem did not come back.

What I figured out was, I used a third party partition tool to shrink
the M$ partition. It did not shrink the M$ partition to a multiple
which M$ used/assumes.

When I used chkdisk, or whatever it is called, indicated partition was
corrupt and did I want it fixed. I answered yes, it did it's thing,
next chkdisk ran clean.

Next Linux boot, failed because chkdisk extened the M$ partition into
the linux partition.

Since then, I have always shrank the partition, run the chkdisk,
created logical disk partitions, boot the box back to M$, delete
logical drive. Then boot/install linux. No problems since with any
install done in that manor.


> Windows has already been caught snooping on users' files
> and reporting the results back to Big Brother Bill, and I can see
> no technical (or, in their case, moral) reason why Windows wouldn't
> spy on Linux partitions given the opportunity.

Talk about moral reason, read your End User License Agreement.


> Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?

I have no problem with M$ wiping the MBR. Mandriva's cd 1 is a rescue
cd with an option to reload the lilo boot loader. No biggie.

I will suggest installing on a seperate disk.

Did a dual install for a friend, on the single drive. Friend caught a
virus and did the right thing, and wiped M$.

Inserted the OEM M$ cd and it proceeded to ghost in clean install. The
whole drive no less, no option, the whole drive.

I got the do the linux install again.

In article <ec475$433c8e84$c690c3ba$6385@TSOFT.COM>, rick@linuxmafia.com
(Rick Moen) writes:

> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
>
>> I've been seeing a lot of posts about dual-booting Linux and Windows.
>> I haven't been paying much attention, though. First of all, I've
>> heard enough horror stories to make me think that dual-booting is
>> more trouble than it's worth.
>
> I'm not the sort of poster you invited responses from, but: I agree.

I invited responses from anyone. Aren't you anyone? :-)

>> However, given Microsoft's reputation for not playing nicely with
>> others (e.g. Windows' tendency to stomp on the MBR in a dual-boot
>> setup), I think I'm justified in being a bit paranoid about whether
>> Windows, when booted, can be trusted to leave Linux partitions
>> alone.
>
> There have been reasonably reliable reports, over the years, of
> MS-Windows clobbering Linux partitions. However, that's likely
> to be ineptitude rather than malice.

Hanlon's Razor states: "Never ascribe to malice that which can
adequately be explained by stupidity." But this little voice
in the back of my mind keeps saying, "But Microsoft isn't stupid!"

> As to "snooping on users' files" inside native-Linux filesystems,
> I rather doubt that. The code to do so would be pretty conspicuous,

Well, perhaps not in their closed-source environment...

> and also word would leak out,

Yes, the _effects_ would be pretty conspicuous.

> causing them a horrendous security problem for very little gain.

Hmm, sounds like Windows' current state. :-)

>> Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?
>
> Me, I go out of my way to have exactly _one_ boot regime (one
> bootloader, one operating system, usually more than one kernel)
> per machine. If I had an MS-Windows box, it would be separate,
> reachable via VNC from my Linux desktop if/when I needed to run
> something Win32-ish. Life is a lot simpler, that way.

Yes, that's the way I'm going right now. I'm not afraid to have
multiple boxes under my desk (including an Amiga, a firewall
running OpenBSD, and an ancient SCO box that I still develop on).

> The main situation where people have little alternative but to
> dual-boot (or use Win4Lin/VMware) concerns laptops.

I managed to snaffle a spare hard drive for my laptop. One
contains Windows, the other Linux. So I'm all set there too.

There's something so much cleaner about having one OS per box.
I'm going to set up my new killer box with Slackware 10.2, and
any Windows stuff I want to run (compilers and my own Windows
development work) should be runnable under Wine.

Thanks for the comments.

--
/~\ cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!

"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote in message
news:1461.133T518T10534055@kltpzyxm.invalid...
> I've been seeing a lot of posts about dual-booting Linux and Windows.
> I haven't been paying much attention, though. First of all, I've
> heard enough horror stories to make me think that dual-booting is
> more trouble than it's worth. Second, I'm concerned about the
> security of a dual-booting system. After all, any OS (at least
> when not in a virtual machine) has access to the entire drive;
> I like to think of partitions as a convention that most operating
> systems are courteous enough to respect.
>
> However, given Microsoft's reputation for not playing nicely with
> others (e.g. Windows' tendency to stomp on the MBR in a dual-boot
> setup), I think I'm justified in being a bit paranoid about whether
> Windows, when booted, can be trusted to leave Linux partitions
> alone. Windows has already been caught snooping on users' files
> and reporting the results back to Big Brother Bill, and I can see
> no technical (or, in their case, moral) reason why Windows wouldn't
> spy on Linux partitions given the opportunity.

My experience is that it's fairly good about leaving them alone, since it
doesn't see Linux specific partitions as mountable. However, just as Linux
can re-format Windows partitions by hand, Windows can be told to reformat
Linux drives. Some recovery tools and system management tools, even good
commercial ones, will do this sort of thing by default.

> Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?
> I don't know whether anything would let me come any closer than
> swappable hard drives, but I'd be interested in what any of you
> have to say.

I've been dual-booting for many years now: it basically works.

On 29 Sep 05 17:33:10 -0800 "Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>
wrote:

> Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?
> I don't know whether anything would let me come any closer than
> swappable hard drives, but I'd be interested in what any of you
> have to say.

Been doing it for years. I have a couple of machines
with excess of 20 OSes to boot up.

--
remove MYSHOES to email

On 29 Sep 05 17:33:10 -0800, "Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

>I've been seeing a lot of posts about dual-booting Linux and Windows.
>I haven't been paying much attention, though. First of all, I've
>heard enough horror stories to make me think that dual-booting is
>more trouble than it's worth.

Depends what your needs are, been dual booting here since '97, still
run windows GUI -- ten years of the win85 desktop hard to let go of

> Second, I'm concerned about the
>security of a dual-booting system. After all, any OS (at least
>when not in a virtual machine) has access to the entire drive;
>I like to think of partitions as a convention that most operating
>systems are courteous enough to respect.
I use reiserfs these days, and the common tools (dos PQMagic) don't
read that. I don't have a problem with security due to dual booting,
the machines that dual boot are primarily used for one OS (except
laptop: win98, win2k, slackware & FreeBSD). Alternate boot is usually
for hardware testing.
>
>However, given Microsoft's reputation for not playing nicely with
>others (e.g. Windows' tendency to stomp on the MBR in a dual-boot
>setup), I think I'm justified in being a bit paranoid about whether
>Windows, when booted, can be trusted to leave Linux partitions
>alone.

With a little thought, systems co-exist without stomping each other,
work out a method and stick with it.

> Windows has already been caught snooping on users' files
>and reporting the results back to Big Brother Bill, and I can see
>no technical (or, in their case, moral) reason why Windows wouldn't
>spy on Linux partitions given the opportunity.

They don't have the technology or desire -- there are far worse
worries about, like using a WinNT filesystem that may be encrypted
at any time by an attacker. That sort of mishap is far less likely
on unix-like systems.
>
>Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?
>I don't know whether anything would let me come any closer than
>swappable hard drives, but I'd be interested in what any of you
>have to say.

Yes, dual booting is safe, another option is to use Live CDs to
try GNU/Linux -- unlike the inferior OS from Redmond, unix _can_
run from read-only media. Windows is inherently unsafe and not
secure.

Grant.

Charlie Gibbs wrote:

.....
> However, given Microsoft's reputation for not playing nicely with
> others (e.g. Windows' tendency to stomp on the MBR in a dual-boot
> setup), I think I'm justified in being a bit paranoid about whether
> Windows, when booted, can be trusted to leave Linux partitions
> alone. Windows has already been caught snooping on users' files
> and reporting the results back to Big Brother Bill, and I can see
> no technical (or, in their case, moral) reason why Windows wouldn't
> spy on Linux partitions given the opportunity.
>
That's not their business. Not to mention the different flavors of
unix/linux filesystems. "Spying" on windows partitions and the registry
will suffice for a long time. In the worst case (of paranoia that is)
you can use encrypted partitions.
But then, just for fun, see my .sig

> Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?
> I don't know whether anything would let me come any closer than
> swappable hard drives, but I'd be interested in what any of you
> have to say.
>
Never had a unsolvable problem installing linux for dual-boot. One has
to expect some difficulties and bios flaws, though, and never attempt
to do it without either enough faith and a knoppix cd (because unlike
most linux install cds in rescue mode, it can handle linux raid just
fine) handy, or (better) a good working backup - at least of the mbr
which easily fits on a floppy.
--
Longhorn error#4711: TCPA / NGSCP VIOLATION: Microsoft optical mouse
detected penguin patterns on mousepad. Partition scan in progress
to remove offending incompatible products. Reactivate MS software.
Linux woodpecker.fdns.net 2.6.13-mm3[LinuxCounter#295241,ICQ#4918962]

On 09/30/05 03:33, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?
> I don't know whether anything would let me come any closer than
> swappable hard drives, but I'd be interested in what any of you
> have to say.

I've been dual booting for over 10 year and the only problem I had was
when installing Windows that keeps thinking it will be the only OS in
the drive and does not accept the existence of a boot manager.

Ciao
Giovanni
--
A computer is like an air conditioner,
it stops working when you open Windows.
Registered Linux user #337974 <http://counter.li.org/>

"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote in message
news:2902.133T221T11783378@kltpzyxm.invalid...

>> As to "snooping on users' files" inside native-Linux filesystems,
>> I rather doubt that. The code to do so would be pretty conspicuous,
>
> Well, perhaps not in their closed-source environment...

Oh, goodness. *OF COURSE* they can snoop the files, just as anyone who can
boot the system from a CD or mounted in another drive can snoop the files.
And MS-Windows has some published support for accessing at least ext2/ext3
file systems.

This sort of thing is why any system that relies on "security through
obscrurity", such as Jabber keeping unencrypted passwords in plan-text XML
files, is amazingly stupid and should be shot. (I just took a look at Jabber
1.4 source code and found this out. It's unspeakably stupid behavior, and
every Jabber server does this unless the installer went through a lot of
extra work to integrate it into another non-standard authentication system.)

>>> Can any of you who use dual-booted systems provide any views?
>>
>> Me, I go out of my way to have exactly _one_ boot regime (one
>> bootloader, one operating system, usually more than one kernel)
>> per machine. If I had an MS-Windows box, it would be separate,
>> reachable via VNC from my Linux desktop if/when I needed to run
>> something Win32-ish. Life is a lot simpler, that way.
>
> Yes, that's the way I'm going right now. I'm not afraid to have
> multiple boxes under my desk (including an Amiga, a firewall
> running OpenBSD, and an ancient SCO box that I still develop on).

"Remote desktop" with the rdesktop tool under Linux usually performs better
than VNC for casual remote Windows boxes. The big drawback is that it
doesn't easily allow rebooting the Windows box.