The Hive Archive

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 Raymend 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.