Hi all,

I've been in the habit of dishing out various live CDs to Windoze users in an effort to convert them to the cause and thus far my doing so has never had any adverse consequences, I'm relieved to say. But I was just wondering if anyone has ever heard of any incident where a fault with a live CD, running as such and not installed, has resulted in data loss on the computer it's been run on? I can't think of anything worse and hope it can't happen, but would like to know for certain.

Thanks,
cc.

It wouldn't be the fault of the live CD but I'm sure there are people who have managed to inadvertently find the install to HD option or stumbled on gparted and decided it would be a good idea to play with that. Like most computer problems the problem is usually caused by a short between the keyboard and the chair

I've recently had a bit of a 'moment' with Gparted setting up a dual boot system for someone. I hosed the partition table trying to remember how to set up extended partitions... Fortunately, Testdisk on my Mepis Live CD rescued the situation quite nicely. So, a disaster and a solution all from running a Live CD!

The usual problem we see reported on these forums is from the people who have chosen the 'use whole disk' option on something like ubuntu's install program without realising what they've just told it to do, and then wonder where their windows system has gone. This is one of the reasons I prefer the Slackware/Arch way of making the user manually partition disks with fdisk/cfdisk. Actually, IMO the nicest approach I've seen for doing disk partitioning for the OS install was the way OpenSolaris does it.

I suppose the Intel e1000e Network Card firmware bricking bug that was in the kernel a while back could also be classed as a disaster if anyone was unlucky enough to be effected by it, but hopefully that was a one off nasty and we won't see any more of those.

It is certainly possiblie (though it's pretty unlikely) for an errant program or driver to go writing all over random parts of your disk, so if what you're looking for is a way to show people linux without risk of any reprocussions on you should something bad happen, then the safest bet is to get them to try it within a virtual machine such as VMware or VirtualBox.

A live CD is unlikely to do such a thing, unless it is specifically and maliciously designed to do so. 99.9 % of live CDs do not automatically mount or touch the HDD and thus cannot change it or corrupt it. I would say 100 %, but I haven't tried them all.