On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Winterlight wrote:
At 09:22 AM 6/1/2007, you wrote:
The recovery CD isn't available, so that is not an issue.
Do you know how to remove the hidden partition and just leave a normal hard
drive, without wiping everything off the drive.... I can't image the single
Primary partition with Drive Image 7, and I can't change anything with
Partition Magic 7. Trying to work with this thing is a pain!
*WARNING* This advice will wipe the data from the drive if you follow it!
I've heard that the systemboard bios on some of those machines will
completely hide the diagnostic partition from being seen no matter what OS
you use. Best bet is to move the drive to another system (preferably a
whitebox, or at least a non-compaq) and clear out the Partition Table, MBR
and first 50 or so MB of the drive (If you don't care about any of the
data on it that is!)
Just boot with (for example) a gentoo livecd basic, and once you're at the
bash prompt:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=1024k count=50
(replace the "X" with the actual drive.) This will overwrite the first 50
MB of the drive with zero's, wiping out any partitions, the MBR, and the
first 50MB of the drive (which is generally where the beginning of the
diagnostic partition is)
Then proceed as normal.
Christopher Fisk
--
"We'll let our friends be the peace keepers and the great country called
America will be the pacemakers."
George W. Bush, September 6, 2000, Candidate Bush speaking in Houston,
Texas.
