*GRUB* ISSUE in microsoft's help forums?

Got bit by grub2 again. This time it was being dumped to the grub "rescue shell" with a

symbol not found: grub_divmod64_full

message.

Looked it up on Google. One of the hits was on Microsoft's help forums, "GRUB ISSUES". I had to go take a look.

Irony abounds.

A user has MSWindows 7 and "Linux Boss" installed on his/her laptop. (At first, I thought, some new or custom boot manager, but maybe Boss Linux?)

And the user seems unaware that a Linux OS needs its own partition, among other things. And so, when MSWIndows disk utilities tell him he has 100MB unused, he takes the message at face value and reformats the partition for MSWindows.

Thus deleting most of grub. Thus deleting his boot manager. Thus the complaint from the part of grub that remained, telling him that grub can't find itself.

The first post is a partial answer, explanation that the Linux OS got wiped, and giving a pointer to the grub project's on-line documentation.

In the next post, the original poster clears things up. He got the laptop free from "the government". (Free? from the government? hmm .... Boss Linux seems to be an India-centric distribution.) Without install disks. Apparently without much instruction as to dual-booting and such.

(Kind of like with my Lenovo, partial steps that almost seem calculated to make users feel betrayed by Linux.)

Well, I started to get a hotmail account so I could go post over there some time back, but started reading the legalese and thought better of that idea. So I can't add my 50 cents to the discussion there. So I'll rant about it here. (Which delayed, by an hour, maybe, the fix.)

First. The bug is in Microsoft's tools. There should be stronger warning about the possibility of deleting something you actually needed when you decide to format a partition that does not contain a file system recognized by MSWindows.

Actually, if Microsoft wants to save its sinking ship and start learning how to cooperate with the rest of the world, MSWindows, even the free-as-in-free-beer "Home" version, should go to the minor effort of reporting the one-or-two-byte partition type flag that is part of their own partitioning scheme. A simple,

This partition appears to have data written by another operating system in it. You might want to check before you format it.

would be much more helpful than the current

 This partition appears to be empty. Do you want to format it?

Second. I'll offer some solutions, since it looks like other users are ending up in the same fix. But I will offer them in a separate post, to make them easier to find.

Third. The real fix for Microsoft's problems is something I've ranted about before, here, for instance.