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Microsoft Still Sabotages Linux MBRs in Vista 7

"This is WAR, and in that regard, I believe we should design Janus such that if this multiboot partition (has a unique partition number (11)) is found, we should warn the user a foreign OS has been detected, give them a chance to exit and read the docs and possibly make a backup, and then repartition the disk, removing the multiboot partition. This way, we disable OS/2 2.0 in *all* cases."

--Microsoft internal mail



Summary: Vista 7 disables GNU/Linux by rewriting the MBR

SEVERAL MONTHS ago we wrote about Microsoft's long history of sabotaging bootloaders/MBRs. In short, Microsoft had resorted to nothing short of technical sabotage (bar the usual excuses) to make it painful if not impossible to run operating systems alongside Windows. Moreover, Windows has a built-in tendency to wipe out competing operating systems and the evidence speaks for itself.



We now have it confirmed that Microsoft has not corrected this bad behaviour in Vista 7. It's not as though Microsoft did not have enough time or programmers. A blogger has just published "a word of warning for Linux users planning on installing Windows 7."

Anytime you reinstall Windows, Windows replaces your MBR (grub stage 1), meaning you can no longer boot into Linux.


This may seem particularly timely now that Microsoft claims -- falsely in fact -- that it helps Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Watch this deceiving new article which Microsoft virtually planted out there to seed falsehoods. This article is filled with statements from Microsoft and the article does not permit comments. In Linux Today, however, there was this one corrective comment which said: "Wasn't it revealed that Microsoft only released this code because it was potentially infringing the GPL of some of its components??" Indeed, as Sun's Chief Open Source Officer reminded us just weeks ago.

Microsoft continues to play dirty against Linux. There is no clear sign of anything changing, not even in Vista 7. It disregards GNU/Linux even if it resides on a separate partition and then rewrites its MBR. Is this what Microsoft calls "interoperability"?

Hands talking

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