My MacBook Air is now for sale. Here is the feedback I sent to Apple following my ordeal this weekend, entitled Lion upgrade corrupted my Windows partition:

There are many reports out there of how an upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion corrupts a Windows Boot Camp partition (usually beyond repair). This happened to me this weekend. I went to the Apple Store to find out what options I had to upgrade my Boot Camp drivers, and he said my only option to get ongoing upgrades for Boot Camp was to upgrade to Lion. So I did, but instead of getting the drivers I needed, I lost my Windows partition.

This is an issue that was reported last year when Lion was released, but Apple seems to have just ignored the problem, allowing their software to corrupt Windows partitions created by the Boot Camp assistant.

This disdain for your Windows users is reprehensible. That you could allow your software to continue to corrupt installations like this for 10 months after the issue was reported is nothing short of irresponsible.

At the very least, the Lion upgrade should detect a Boot Camp installation and warn that it might corrupt the Windows partition. Even better would be to safely resize it rather than writing over it. What good is a recovery partition if it's written over the data you care the most about?

For me, this is the end of my relationship with Apple for my computing platform. I am selling my MacBook Air and will be getting a Windows laptop. While the hardware is nice, it's not worth the grief of actively destructive software.

I do advanced software and systems work. I've done custom partition management on PCs for years. I've upgraded Windows operating systems for years. Still, I've never encountered a situation where an operating system would overwrite a user's partition without extensive warnings and prompts. Apple is now permanently on my black list.