Alex wrote:

Quoting Eric Dondelinger <Eric.Dondelinger@linux.lu>:

Hi Al,

On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 08:42:21AM +0100, Alex wrote:

I have here a machine with different OS'es on it: Linux, Novell, WinXP..

Every time I boot Windows, the MBR is changed! Why???

How can I prevent Windows to touch this MBR with its deadly tentacles??

Err... which Windows variant is this? Any chance there's some sort of
virus active there, or even some antivirus that would identify the MBR
as suspect and trying to "fix" it?
Are we talking cold boot, warm reboot, is hibernation involved, ...


Cold reboot.

At the office, we have a dual-boot notebook (WinXP SP2, Mandriva, grub
bootloader) which doesn't show any such symptoms, same goes for my old
K6-2 350 at home which dual-boots Win98 and some old SuSE. I've never
encountered such behavior either with W2K, so I feel safe to say this
probably is no problem inherent to the Windows OS.

It's also the first time for me to find such a problem! IMHO it has
something to
do with the BIOS. This one has an Intel BIOS. What I have done is creating a
boot floppy with grub on it.

Greets Eric


Al
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Another solution is to use "virus protection option" from bios
=> he will prevent any change to the first 512 octets
(if extended partitions, as far as I know he will not protect ;-)
and sure when trying to attempt to change
you will see a nice black box information when this appends ...

One raison to change MBR: if it's a windows 98 and he located in the second (or after) partition
you need to change ID from partition (by adding "10" in hex I guess), but there nothing to do with XP.
And the change is only minor to hide the partition, but it's not working with XP ;-)

Can you say what is changed to the MBR ?

Good day,
Laurent.

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