On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 1:40 PM, Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
Good advice, but I'm broke. Anyway, the problem isn't /dev/sda3, the problem is /dev/sda1. As Patrick pointed out, it's small potatoes at less than 1.5GB (of a 320GB hard drive). The problem isn't the size, the problem is certain Linux utilities (namely, cfdisk) don't like it and fail simply because it exists. That's why I was trying to figure out if it is actually necessary. That's hard to do when I don't even understand what it is or why Toshiba (and others) set up some of their laptops this way. Must it be present for the laptop to boot? I don't know. Will it be untouched, deleted, or recreated if I use Toshiba's recovery system do a custom reinstall of Windows 7 to a smaller "C:\" (aka /dev/sda2) partition? I don't know, but I guess I'll find out. Some searching seems to indicate that is this a fairly common question. Answers, however, are harder to come by, and as always you have to stumble through a lot of wild speculation and misinformation to find them. As best as I've been able to determine, this "EISA partition" contains some kind of utilities that perhaps interact with the BIOS and/or fill some kind of hardware diagnostic function. fdisk can't even identify a file system on this thing. It doesn't seem to be a Windows thing, it seems to be a hardware thing. It might be related to the recovery software various manufacturers ship with their laptops, since many manufacturers are no longer providing recovery discs, or it might not. On this laptop, Toshiba's actual recovery partition is /dev/sda3, which is about 10GB, and which can be deleted if you make your own set of recovery DVDs (which I've done). But maybe the recovery process actually needs /dev/sda1 to be present? Again, I don't know. In any case, GParted doesn't seem to mind /dev/sda1, so if necessary I can use the GParted Live CD to create my partitions in advance of installing any Linux distro, and not worry about whatever touchy partitioning tools any particular distro uses in its installation routine. Michael _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
