Am I just Being Paranoid?

[nujinini]

Hi!

After recovering of our mac from some thieves. I sent the machine to the mac shop with the installer CD just to make sure they make a fresh install on the system. After all, the buyer who was using the mac was an IT guru working in one of the companies here. And I wanted to make sure the system is sanitized well.

It took the technicians the whole day trying but the installation would end up hanging at some point.

And so I volunteered to help those mac techies. I went down the shop and asked them what they had done.

They reformatted the HD with their in-house tools only to end up with a hanged system. They did this several times. They were about to conclude that either the HD is damaged or the something is wrong with the logic board. They were asking for another day to analyze just to isolate what the problem really is.

And so I volunteered if it would be ok to use my machine to try to help find the problem and they willingly obliged. After the HD was mounted in my Mint, I executed

sudo fdisk -l

And was surprised to see a partition "sdb1" in the first segment of the HD, formatted as FAT32, several MBs. I never touched this HD since we got it two years ago. It was installed in the US where it was bought.

And then I executed:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

It wiped the HD clean and this time, they were able to make the installation without a hitch.

MY question is...

Could it be possible that this partition was maliciously placed by the suspects to try cause some degree of problems for us? I didn't place it there. As I said, it was bought in the US where I think they don't put FAT32 partition on the first segment of a Mac installation. Or do they?

Or am I just being paranoid after everything we went through?

Any opinions are most welcome, for my peace of mind. thank you!

nujinini

[hazel]

Did anyone look inside the partition before wiping it to see what was on it? I think that's the first thing I would have done.

[nujinini]

Did anyone look inside the partition before wiping it to see what was on it? I think that's the first thing I would have done.

Oh hazel hazel. You asked the question that I hoped nobody would ask

I failed to look first what's inside that partition. Actually I just thought about it after the installation was done.

I guess there would be no way by now to find out what's inside that partition.

But if I may ask...please... what would be the worst case or problem it could have given assuming there was really something inside?

For example, can a spyware be activated from that small FAT32 partition and spy on everything the mac would do?

Or was it just enough to cause some head scratching (which the mac techies did) for people who might try to make a reinstall?

Thank you!

[elija]

I'm wondering if there will be a small FAT32 partition in your newly installed Mac as part of the OS installation. I know nothing about Apples so that might be areally stupid thought

[nujinini]

I'm wondering if there will be a small FAT32 partition in your newly installed Mac as part of the OS installation. I know nothing about Apples so that might be areally stupid thought

Yes elija. My suspicions grew when I started to realize on what would a tiny FAT32 partition be doing at the first segment of an Apple HD. But then again, hazel was right, I should have known better and have taken time to peep into it.

Could that tiny FAT32 be the cause of the hanging reinstallation. After all, after I wiped the HD, everything went on smoothly.

I wonder

[sml156]

Maybe he wanted to dual boot windows 98 on it