I was wondering if anyone better versed in the complexities of laptop hardware -- which is probably almost everyone on this list -- could provide some useful advice about how to set-up my Toshiba L505 laptop for dual-booting.
fdisk -l shows this now: Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x74b860c1 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 192 1536000 27 Unknown Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda2 192 19882 158165141 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 37729 38914 9512960 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda4 24981 37729 102398977 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 24981 37206 98190336 83 Linux /dev/sda6 37206 37729 4207616 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order This laptop (and many other Toshiba models) come out of the box with three primary partitions. What is currently /dev/sda3 is a recovery partition, useful for restoring the computer to its "out-of-the-box" state or some variation thereof. However, I made recovery discs, so I already know that I don't need this partition. What is currently /dev/sda2 is where Window 7 resides. When I installed Ubuntu, all I did was shrink /dev/sda2 and created the extended partition (/dev/sda4) on which Ubuntu resides. The partition I'm not sure about is /dev/sda1, which as you can see is apparently bootable. I found this discussion: http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/619983-solved-mystery-partition-toshiba-notebook.html It seems to indicate that /dev/sda1 is an EISA partition, and I'm not really clear on what that means or whether I actually need it. My problem is that I wanted to try installing Arch Linux and Arch uses cfdisk for the install. cfdisk doesn't like the fact that /dev/sda1 doesn't end on a cylinder boundary and it craps out with a fatal error, saying something about me having illegal partitions (grrr). After some investigating, I figured out that I can get rid of /dev/sda3 and I decided what I want to do is reformat and reinstall Windows 7 using the recovery discs I made, then install Arch (or maybe Debian, if Squeeze really is released this weekend). What I'm not sure about is, do I need this mystery EISA partition? I'm not sure what will happen when I do the recovery. The Toshiba manual says you have the choice of restoring to out-of-the-box state or reinstalling on a custom-sized C:\ partition. It also says the recovery process will completely wipe the hard drive. It doesn't say anything about whether it will recreate this small mystery partition. In fact, there's no indication anywhere in the manual that this partition even exists -- it's like they don't want you to know about it. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing? Michael _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
