Re: workaround for MS Windows' insanity (ignores partition types / hidden flag since 2018)

[Nicholas Vinson]

On 11/13/19 18:13, Marcel Partap wrote:
> 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:
Why wouldn't the following work?

Partition 1: type: FAT32        Linux mount point:      /boot
Partition 2: type: 0            Linux mount point:      /

The kernel image, initramfs, and all the files GRUB needs to boot are 
placed in partition 1, the rest of Linux in partition 2.  At that point 
you won't be relying on GRUB to mount partition 2 as your initramfs 
would be handling it.

Regards,
Nicholas Vinson

> >    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
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