Microsoft's Intentional Ignorance of Other Operating Systems

windows microsoft unix

I’m really happy that Microsoft employees are blogging more. Though I miss Robert Scoble. Microsoft really lost a lot of public relations points when Scoble left.

Today, I came across a post by Raymond Chen, one of the great Microsoft guys that keeps new versions of Windows compatible with older applications. Truly, compatibility is a heroic task, one that most programmers don’t want to deal with.

However in recent discussions on Windows blindly overwriting the master boot record (and in the process screwing everyone with alternate operating systems), he says:

In the discussions following why Windows setup lays down a new boot sector, some commenters suggested that Windows setup could detect the presence of a non-Windows partition as a sign that the machine onto which the operating system is being installed belongs to a geek. In that way, the typical consumer would be spared from having to deal with a confusing geeky dialog box that they don’t know how to answer.

The problem with this plan is that not everybody with a non-Windows partition type is necessarily a geek. Many OEM machines ship with a hard drive split into two partitions, one formatted for Windows and the second a small non-Windows partition to be used during system diagnostics and recovery. The presence of this small non-Windows partition is typically not well-known, and it comes into play only when you boot from the manufacturer’s “system recovery CD”.

I would challenge Raymond Chen to install Linux, because this problem isn’t difficult to solve and has been solved by every major Linux distribution years ago.

This has been one of my biggest all time gripes with Microsoft. They put on blinders and ignore everything not invented at Microsoft (except when they steal Apple’s GUI, but that’s another entry).

I’ve reproduced the common system partition types that Linux fdisk knows about. If Microsoft took this list and detected the top ten most common ones, they could solve this problem. If they decided to spend another couple hours implementing all of them, they would make installing Vista a breeze for those of us who know there is more than one Microsoft way.

However, they won’t because why would Microsoft care if they overwrite your grub/lilo boot record? That just means you will only be using Windows, right? I think they forget that I am a customer too, and I don’t appreciate it when a product destroys my setup.

 0  Empty           1e  Hidden W95 FAT1  75  PC/IX            be  Solaris boot
 1  FAT12           24  NEC DOS          80  Old Minix        bf  Solaris
 2  XENIX root      39  Plan 9           81  Minix / old Lin  c1  DRDOS/sec (FAT-
 3  XENIX usr       3c  PartitionMagic   82  Linux swap       c4  DRDOS/sec (FAT-
 4  FAT16 <32M      40  Venix 80286      83  Linux            c6  DRDOS/sec (FAT-
 5  Extended        41  PPC PReP Boot    84  OS/2 hidden C:   c7  Syrinx
 6  FAT16           42  SFS              85  Linux extended   da  Non-FS data
 7  HPFS/NTFS       4d  QNX4.x           86  NTFS volume set  db  CP/M / CTOS / .
 8  AIX             4e  QNX4.x 2nd part  87  NTFS volume set  de  Dell Utility
 9  AIX bootable    4f  QNX4.x 3rd part  8e  Linux LVM        df  BootIt
 a  OS/2 Boot Manag 50  OnTrack DM       93  Amoeba           e1  DOS access
 b  W95 FAT32       51  OnTrack DM6 Aux  94  Amoeba BBT       e3  DOS R/O
 c  W95 FAT32 (LBA) 52  CP/M             9f  BSD/OS           e4  SpeedStor
 e  W95 FAT16 (LBA) 53  OnTrack DM6 Aux  a0  IBM Thinkpad hi  eb  BeOS fs
 f  W95 Ext'd (LBA) 54  OnTrackDM6       a5  FreeBSD          ee  EFI GPT
10  OPUS            55  EZ-Drive         a6  OpenBSD          ef  EFI (FAT-12/16/
11  Hidden FAT12    56  Golden Bow       a7  NeXTSTEP         f0  Linux/PA-RISC b
12  Compaq diagnost 5c  Priam Edisk      a8  Darwin UFS       f1  SpeedStor
14  Hidden FAT16 <3 61  SpeedStor        a9  NetBSD           f4  SpeedStor
16  Hidden FAT16    63  GNU HURD or Sys  ab  Darwin boot      f2  DOS secondary
17  Hidden HPFS/NTF 64  Novell Netware   b7  BSDI fs          fd  Linux raid auto
18  AST SmartSleep  65  Novell Netware   b8  BSDI swap        fe  LANstep
1b  Hidden W95 FAT3 70  DiskSecure Mult  bb  Boot Wizard hid  ff  BBT
1c  Hidden W95 FAT3

Comments

AMT

If you are a geek and can install, operate, administrate *N*X, why do you need Windoze in the first place? ;-)

Do you find something which can only be done in Windows?

Superkoko

Wow, that's the exact same reflexion I did when I have seen Raymond's blog entry.

I also wonder why Windows install would not have as first options:

1) Typical installation (recommended)
Any user should click here.

2) Advanced installation (for expert only)
Only click here if you perfectly know what you're doing.
For administrators & very advanced users only!

Like that, with (1) there would be almost no option.

landis

This is also my number one gripe. I recently solved this problem by installing windows on a completely separate drive, physically disconnecting my linux drive. Then I just use a live cd to add an entry to grub for windows.

As for finding something that can only be done in windows, gaming comes to mind. Cedega is good but not perfect and the amount of finagling you have to do to get it to work with some, if not all, games makes it worth the relatively minor hassle of keeping windows from wiping your mbr. After all, it may be evil for windows to do what it does, but time is a non-renewable resource.

Discussion