A lot of laptops have "secret" partitions, where they store either recovery images or things like that. My Dell laptop came with one that had a media player (DVD, CD, &c); if you pressed the "Media" button when the machine was off instead of the "power" button, it would boot into this partition rather than Windows.
Maybe the point of this is to hide these "secret" partitions so people don't try to boot them? And during development, it was easier to have a "whitelist" rather than a "blacklist", because the team that made the partition was different than the team that wrote the BIOS?
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Filtering out secret partitions?
Date: 2012-11-16 10:42 am (UTC)Maybe the point of this is to hide these "secret" partitions so people don't try to boot them? And during development, it was easier to have a "whitelist" rather than a "blacklist", because the team that made the partition was different than the team that wrote the BIOS?