Boot.ini Deletion Explained: Always Read the Manual
There was a bit of controversy last week about the Trinity update for EVE Online. Due to a few oversights on the part of developers, many machines were left unbootable after the patch clobbered the configuration for the boot loader of various windows distributions (most specifically, Win2000/XP/2003). This oversight steamed a lot of people, and now the developers wish to tell you all why.
It all comes down to reading the manual. The installer script for their patch software allows for an implicit path in certain places, and in other places (in the case of the Delete command) it requires an explicit path. The statement 'Delete "Boot.ini"' was the culprit. This implicit\explicit mix up resulted in a locational problem.
The fix we made to the installer script was not to explicitly delete these two files but rather implicitly overwrite them. That fix was made in the early morning after the release, on 6 December at 06:08 GMT, and a fixed graphics content upgrade was released shortly thereafter. The faulty upgrade had been pulled from Tranquility a few hours after the problem was discovered, at around 03:40 GMT.
So there you have it, the early bird catches the worm. In this case however, the early bird catches the bug and is left unbootable.
Why do you have a file with the same name as a Windows system startup file? The answer is really "legacy"; it has been like that since 2001 when the file was introduced on the server and later migrated over to the client in 2002, so this file has been with us for over 6 years. We are reviewing all filenames and changing the name of any file that conflicts with Windows.
There you have it, hopefully, boot.ini will get renamed to something a little less ambiguous. On a side note, the patch really does make EVE Online look a lot better.
about the boot.ini issue [EVE Insider]
[via Kotaku]
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 12 December 2007
Other stuff like this: bad script, boot.ini, eve online, installer, rtfm, zomg system failure
