On Sat, Feb 05, 2011 at 09:10:21AM -0800, Michael Moore wrote: ... > 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 ...
A general rule of thumb for computers. Always have a second copy. Hard drives are cheap. Most laptops have a way to attach a second drive (thinkpads use "ultrabay", swappable between CD and floppy and battery and hard drive tray. With linux, you can use dd (or ddrescue) to make a bit level copy to a second drive. Windoze may complain if you boot from that second drive (windoze tracks hardware) but even if it won't boot, you still have a copy of the original bits you can restore to the original disk. If you use a model-identical hard drive under Linux, then the copy drive functions almost identically to the original. This is good for on-the-road backups. Not sure about grub2 - that may "helpfully" insist on the same drive ID. Hard drives are getting cheaper, so a drive on the shelf is not a good investment, dollars per gigabyte. But it is an excellent investment in a quick-swap spare. An identical drive may not be available next year. So, buy a second drive, copy the bits onto it, see how it behaves used as a replacement (probably usably but poorly under windoze). Then try removing /dev/sda3 and see what happens; now you can put it back if it doesn't work. Keith PS: Lately, in my more paranoid moments, I wonder if these unexplained partitions are where the Chinese People's Liberation Army hides their cyber-war logic bombs. Not much hiding, but Americans don't do much looking. It wouldn't be difficult to write an app that checksums these partitions, looking for changes over time or between machines. That would be interesting. -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
