Microsoft tries to block Linux off Windows 8 PCs

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 10:11:13PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 05:04:15PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote
> 
> > I judge from this that what's likely to actually happen is rather
> > different from the initial "shrill paranoia" theorized approaches,
> > which would have generated a pretty enormous potential for
> > self-inflicted DOS attacks.
> > 
> > Notably, as long as the BIOS provides an option of going around the
> > "check the sigs" logic, which is *very* much in the interests of
> > motherboard vendors, it shouldn't be very difficult to avoid having a
> > problem.
> 
>   I seem to remember several years ago that it was fashionable for BIOS
> to have a "do not write to boot/ sector or partition table" setting.  I
> had to turn it off before I could install linux.  Then I turned it back
> on after the install.  Whatever happened to that?  It was so much
> simpler than UEFI.

Well it only protected the boot sector when using BIOS calls.  Once DOS
was replaced by a real OS with native drivers for the disk controller,
the BIOS no longer had a say.  It used to be considered a protection
from DOS boot sector viruses.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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