Launcher wipes entire SSD when uninstalling | Hacker News Reader

Launcher wipes entire SSD when uninstalling

bugs.mojang.com

59 pointsundefined117 comments

OMG they reimplemented the infamous Myth 2 bug.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_II:_Soulblighter#Uninstal...

Two other users mentioned that this also happened with Half Life and Phantasy Start.

Makes me wonder if a lot of software has this bug and we only hear about it with the popular products. Also I wonder if something makes games especially prone to this sort of issue.

The Myth one was particularly infamous because it’d wipe your entire C or D drive if you installed to root, and because Bungie (doing the right thing) spent nearly a million because they found it literally a day or two after shipping final copies to stores and did a recall. I don’t think it actually had any significant field impact.

As far as especially prone, custom installers were popular in the 90s (not even sure the windows MSI framework was there yet for the classic examples) and games get installed in weird places.

Weird stuff gets overlooked in testing. Nobody ever tried installing it somewhere than Program Files is a reasonable guess, saying this as an expert in software quality. Totally plausible an entire org would have that blind spot.

...in the 90s. But anyone involved in old school PC gaming knows these examples and should be planning for them in test. This was a noob mistake at a business level, no lie.

Software happens to repeat the same bugs all over again. That doesn't imply that it's caused by the same mechanics: more like "who would have thunk that leap years/app installs/usernames are hard?"

I see this as a failure of what a HN described elsewhere of securing the OS against a user and not apps as well. Ideally all apps would be security principals and appear in ACLs. Then say each file created couldn't be deleted by another app unless it was present in the file ACL. I believe APPX packages on Windows now do this, a new user is created for them.

this is what linux package managers do. the package itself doesn't handle deleting files at all, because the package manager, which tracks the files created at install time takes care of it.

The original half life release did this too back in the day. It would lead to the entirely of program files being deleted based on a default install.

> If you have installed Minecraft Dungeons in a custom directory, there is a chance uninstalling Minecraft Dungeons Launcher and/or the game will remove the entire parent directory and everything in it.

It doesn't erase the entire disk when uninstalling (just the parent directory), however, the bug is still extremely troubling.

It would if you installed it right in C: without subfolder. It would definitely was all your games if you installed in your games directory without a subfolder of it's own.

A similar thing happened with Phantasy Star Online 2 a while ago https://kotaku.com/my-feelings-on-pso2-issues-right-now-at-l...

Please use the original title: Launcher wipes entire install location when uninstalling

The title was "Launcher wipes entire SSD when uninstalling" when this was posted.

They updated it since then: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCL-14107#changehistorydetail...

While annoying, this doesn't delete system restore info, so you can just rollback the system to 5 minutes before the installation and get back all your stuff.

They probably should check those wildcards a bit more thoroughly.

This is not a wildcard issue. If you installed Minecraft Launcher in "C:\Program Files", it would delete "C:\Program Files". It would not delete the files the installer created.

This kind of issue isnt that uncommon. I accidentally installed a program to my desktop folder one time. And the uninstall just deleted it and all my existing files. Windows didnt like that at all.

> Windows had not seen such bullshit before

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