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workaround for MS Windows' insanity (ignores partition types / hidden fl
From: |
Marcel Partap |
Subject: |
workaround for MS Windows' insanity (ignores partition types / hidden flag since 2018) |
Date: |
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:13:48 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.2.2 |
Dear grub devs,
as we have just last week released a hundred of our debian-based
https://github.com/fsfw-dresden/usb-live-linux/ sticks .. and at the moment are
rolling out a version for primary schools, I have stumbled over the pure
stupidity that is Windows 10's handling of partitioned usb drives. As seems
abundantly documented, windows changed its behaviour sometime last year and now
blatantly ignores the hidden flag, displaying partitions regardless of type and
prominently offering to format non-windows filesystems. I was somewhat shocked
at this ridiculous demeanour.. After an hour of investigating this I found the
very sole workaround was to set the partition type to 0 - empty/none. This was
the only way to windows not show and offer to format partitions beyond the
exchange FAT partition. Rejoicing, on restart I found out that grub would not
proceed booting from a partition of type "empty". Now semantically, that is
totally correct. However, in order to provide us with a coping mechanism for
such live linux use scenarios, I propose to add a flag that overrides this code:
> static inline int
> grub_msdos_partition_is_empty (int type)
> {
> return (type == GRUB_PC_PARTITION_TYPE_NONE);
> }
to allow booting from partitions of type 0 empty/none.
This should cause less confusion to the hundreds of young students atm
wondering about "what the hell is formatting" ..
Best Regards,
#marcel
- workaround for MS Windows' insanity (ignores partition types / hidden flag since 2018),
Marcel Partap <=