On 11/1/2012 2:30 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 01/11/2012 08:13 PM, Urs Holzer wrote:
>> Some of them actually write something into the gap behind the master
>> boot record.
>
> Surely you can't actually do that in a protected-mode operating system.
> (I.e., anything less ancient than Windows NT, circa 1993.)
Step #1: Get a thumb drive with one of those stupid utilities that can 
secure/format your thumb drive.
Step #2: Run the utility.
Step #3: Without closing it, remove the thumb drive.
Step #4: Watch the utility misidentify your main drive as a thumb drive, 
and tell you that its some crazy drive number, and that it needs to be 
formatted.
Step #5: Actually make the stupid mistake of doing this.

What the system start generating messes of error, and when you reboot, 
discover that your partition table, boot loader, and MBR are all hosed, 
and somehow this has monkeyed with the OS badly enough that you also 
can't use the install disk for it, to get into the OS, and repair the 
MBR. Heck, I found a utility to recover the partitions, so, in theory, I 
can get all the files off, but even Linux doesn't seem to want to let me 
fix the MBR on the thing now (it keeps complaining that its the wrong 
type, or something, so.. guessing something is marked in there, which 
prevents it being mounted in a way that will allow you to write to it 
correctly, to fix the problem).

So, yeah, all the stuff intended to prevent more general access issues, 
does jack all to prevent malicious disk writes. :p

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