Microsoft: still not playing nice

I upgraded my Lenovo S10 netbook to Windows 7 RC 1 today (I turned it into a dual boot Windows / Ubuntu machine shortly after I got it, so after upgrading the Ubuntu partition to 9.04 (Jaunty) it was time to upgrade the Windows partition from 7 beta to the release candidate.

Overall the process was pretty smooth, but it was stereotypically Microsoft in one sense: the installation completely stomped on grub, so that after installing RC 1 I had to pull out my Jaunty install USB drive and re-install grub on the master boot record to be able to access Ubuntu again.

Compared to the Ubuntu install process (which makes it trivial to make a Windows-only machine into a dual boot Windows / Linux machine), it just seems downright childish of Microsoft to cavalier stomp over the bootloader.  You’d think after all these years they’d have learned to play a little nicer with others, but apparently not.