This is a rant, a warning, and a request for help. The help part: any ideas on how to get Windows 7 Starter onto a netbook for which it's licensed without buying a disk?
The story: we've been waiting for the "Pinetrail" version of the Atom to show up in netbooks, and so when Costco started carrying the Samsung N-150 I snapped one up. As soon as it arrived I installed Ubuntu "Netbook Remix". The installer for that distro doesn't support LVM and won't let you install without creating a swap partition, so a minimum of two partitions were required. Samsung's setup used three, so I wiped it, figuring I could restore later (after enabling LVM and freeing up the swap partition), and moved on. Big mistake. The device does not ship with any recovery media. Worse, Samsung doesn't make disks available (doesn't even sell them), and won't honor the warranty on the device unless it's running the software it shipped with. (I didn't ask what happens if you have a virus that wipes your drive, having already admitted that I'd wiped mine on-purpose.) There was nothing in the packaging to tell me I was losing the warranty -- but that's not really my problem because Costco has a great return policy. :-) That said, I'd rather keep the device if I can set it up to dual-boot to keep the warranty intact. If not, consider yourselves warned away from an otherwise excellent product. I wonder how much Samsung's saving much by not including recovery media (as, e.g., Acer does on similar products I've purchased). Can anybody suggest strategies for restoring? If, for example, I could find somebody with an unmolested similar model is it likely that dd-ing the first few gigs of the HD (where the special boot blocks and recovery partition lie) would work? Thanks, --Eric -- ****************************************************************************** * From the desktop of: Eric House, [email protected] * * Crosswords 4.4 for WinMobile plays over the internet: xwords.sf.net * ****************************************************************************** _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
