I looked in the FAQ and elsewhere and found nothing on this. (Is this the first time this has happened?)
I just installed Fedora 2 on my dual-boot WinXP system and selected for GRUB _not_ to be installed, since I use Partition Commander, but when I booted Linux (from the Partition Commander start-up screen) I got a GRUB prompt.
Three questions:
1) How do I get rid of/disable GRUB so that Partition Commander can boot directly into Fedora and not GRUB?
I have Explore2fs on the WinXP side, so I can access all parts of the Linux partition on my system. (Boy, that application makes a joke of security, doesn't it?) I've never actually used Explore2fs to write to or delete stuff from the Linux partition, because I know how dangerous that is, but since I'm looking at having to re-install the whole thing anyway, what the hell.
Under /boot there are two folders, big as life - grub and lost+found. The grub folder only contains one file - splash.xpm.gz.
2) If I can't get rid of GRUB, how can I modify Partition Commander to ignore it?
Currently, Partition Commander is booting to:
product: mbr_grub.dat drive: mbr primary 102MB GNU GRUB version 0.94
I'm not sure how I would redirect GRUB, but the other Linux partitions which are visible are a 10GB logical partition and a smaller logical one which I assume is the swap partition.
3) If neither of the above is possible, how do I boot to Fedora from GRUB? I looked at the help function and read the relevant parts of TFM online, but frankly it's above my head, unfortunately. :(
Thanks in advance,
Marc Adler wrote:
I have Explore2fs on the WinXP side, so I can access all parts of the Linux partition on my system. (Boy, that application makes a joke of security, doesn't it?)
Not really. It makes obvious what is already known: if someone has physical access to a machine, they have a huge amount of power. If they want, they can even replace the hard drive, or take a byte-by- byte copy and analyse it later.
Likewise, if they have suitable privileges on another OS on the same machine [1], they can get raw access to any drive on the machine.
There are really only three answers to this:
* Don't let anyone untrusted have physical access to sensitive computers.
* On multi-boot machines, you need to keep security tight for ALL OSes.
* Encrypt sensitive data, and ensure that the key is not stored on the computer. This probably also implies having encrypted swap.
I'm sorry I can't help you with your main problem: I don't know Partition Commander. It's possible that Partition Commander has made unwarranted assumptions: it sees grub the package, and assumes you'll want to use it to boot.
James.
[1] Barring virtualisation sotware and hardware, and the limits they may apply.
James Wilkinson wrote:
Not really. It makes obvious what is already known: if someone has physical access to a machine, they have a huge amount of power.
I was surprised to see that I could access the Linux partition so easily. All you have to do is run Partition Commander et al., resize the Linux partition, install some version of Windows, get whatever info you need, then repeat the process in reverse. No one would be the wiser.
I'm sorry I can't help you with your main problem: I don't know Partition Commander. It's possible that Partition Commander has made unwarranted assumptions: it sees grub the package, and assumes you'll want to use it to boot.
Is this really a problem without precedent or am I asking in the wrong list? And if the latter, any ideas where I might better direct my inquiry?
Thanks.
Marc Adler said:
James Wilkinson wrote:
Not really. It makes obvious what is already known: if someone has physical access to a machine, they have a huge amount of power.
I was surprised to see that I could access the Linux partition so easily. All you have to do is run Partition Commander et al., resize the Linux partition, install some version of Windows, get whatever info you need, then repeat the process in reverse. No one would be the wiser.
It would be much simpler to just reboot into single user mode.
The point that James was trying to make is that if you don't physically secure the machine you have no hope of the data on it being secure.
William Hooper wrote:
It would be much simpler to just reboot into single user mode.
Well, there you go.
The point that James was trying to make is that if you don't physically secure the machine you have no hope of the data on it being secure.
Yeah, I was concurring with his point.
On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 21:00, Marc Adler wrote:
I was surprised to see that I could access the Linux partition so easily. All you have to do is run Partition Commander et al., resize the Linux partition, install some version of Windows, get whatever info you need, then repeat the process in reverse. No one would be the wiser.
I've been experimenting with Sorcery linux. It talks about making an encrypted file system to prevent access like this I think.
I tried running it on a PII 400 with 512M ram, and that's not quite enough horsepower to compile all the sources in a timely fashion.
The website is http://sorcerer.wox.org