Re: Photoscore

[David Wright]

On Mon 28 Nov 2016 at 10:11:07 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:

> You mean, if it doesn't already own you.  My father is a retired
> professor of theoretical physics who is still publishing.  He received a
> final draft of such a paper back from a physics journal along with
> instructions to put any corrections into PDF annotations.  So I
> installed Okular for him.
> 
> Since the instructions were very detailed but only fit Acrobat Reader,
> he decided to use that after all and started up Windows.  Which decided
> to do a few updates.
> 
> The only partition on his computer that is now still a Linux partition
> is the swap partition.
> 
> Windows decided to update itself to Windows 10 (without asking back, of
> course) and decided to move all of Windows 8 into recovery partitions.
> Instead of partitioning off space from the existing Windows partition,
> it decided to rather junk all the Linux partitions and repurpose them.
> 
> This is why this is called the "Windows 10 anniversary edition": it's
> like your wife celebrating your wedding anniversary by murdering your
> mistress and draping her on your bed.
> 
> It is quite unclear how much, if anything, will be salvageable from his
> actual work environment.
> 
> All of the Linux partitions are now "Windows recovery environment" or
> "Microsoft basic data" partitions and it is not clear how much of the
> original data will still be in there.
> 
> Really, if you still have some dual boot environment, remove the Windows
> partition as fast as you can before it destroys your system.
> 
> Microsoft is taking the last stand on the desktop and will go down with
> it.  Don't let it take out its despair on your property.

The most important thing in this situation is not to panic.
It's quite possible that only two things have been altered:
the Master Boot Record may have been overwritten, and the
partition types may have been altered in the absence of any
other changes, in particular to their contents.

So it should be worth booting from a live linux CD to mount the
partitions to check their contents, and to reinstall Grub
(or whatever you use to boot) into the MBR. (Modify the latter
if you have a EFI disk rather than MBR.)

Note that Linux used to use the same GUID as a Microsoft Basic Data
Partition so these could be relict, or set by MS as a convenient
"bucket" value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_basic_data_partition

Cheers,
David.