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Another reason for not limitting Primaries

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 5:14 pm
by sigi
My two Hard Disks will presumably never contain more than 4 Primaries each: My Win7 on HD-0, an Extended on HD-1, the EMBRM and a few Linux distros. Even so, I would not like the idea of limitting Primaries because I hate to have all of them always present in the MBR as would be the case with Pimaries limitted. The reason is that I would like to perform banking in a reasonably safe Linux environment which does not see any Windows environment at all. As far as I can see there is no means to achieve this with Primaries limitted, is there?

Re: Another reason for not limitting Primaries

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2012 11:35 am
by DrTeeth
1) Linux will not write to a windows partition unless you tell it to and windows will not recognise a linux partition either.
2) I use unlimited primaries so my children cannot see my (ahem ;-)) video collection when they use my PC.

DrTeeth

Re: Another reason for not limitting Primaries

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2012 4:20 pm
by sigi
DrTeeth wrote:1) Linux will not write to a windows partition unless you tell it to and windows will not recognise a linux partition either. DrTeeth
I thought it was the read attribute that might import Windows malware into the Linux environment?

Re: Another reason for not limitting Primaries

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2012 4:36 pm
by DrTeeth
Reading itself does not execute a program. Windows malware will not run on Linux anyway. Look at the trouble one has to go through with WINE to get windows software to run on Linux...it cannot happen by accident.

Re: Another reason for not limitting Primaries

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 1:03 am
by sigi
So, whereas opening e.g. a pdf file in Windows can activate malicious code, doing so in Linux could not? (Excuse me, I am an absolute newbie at Linux)

Re: Another reason for not limitting Primaries

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 8:11 am
by DrTeeth
Reading a file is not the same as opening/running a file. Windows software will not run on Linux unless you go out of your way to run it. Linux' security is better than windows.

You really do need to get some basic grounding in Linux...there are many sites that will help you along. To be honest, if I were you, I'd bone up on security too. Have you considered what would happen to your data if your computer got stolen?

Re: Another reason for not limitting Primaries

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 3:49 am
by pmshah
Very simply put only way to hide primary partitions to preclude partition numbering errors in windows is to not limit the primaries. Syarting from Win 95 till Win 8 I have never had a problem with it.