Daniel Bush wrote:
Anyone here who can offer advice on dual booting a modern dell laptop
(inspiron 9400) whilst preserving at least some of the dell
functionality?
I've done some research on this [1], and it looks like I have
1) a dell-based MBR
2) a dell utility partition at the front of the disk
3) winXP in the 2nd parition
4) a dell system recovery (symantec-based image) partition (DSR) at
the end of the disk
5) a hidden partition that won't be detected by the bios (a process
called 'hpa') which is right at the end of the disk which allows you
to use dell media direct (play dvd's without loading a full os).
I just did an install a few weeks ago on a Latitude.
I opted to format the disk from after partition 2 i.e after the Windows
partition.
I used gparted on a bootable CD to reduce the Windows partition from 100G to
20G.
I'm interested to know if people are putting grub in the MBR or trying
to preserve the dell MBR, because if you use grub, you are probably
going to lose the functionality for both the utility and rescue
partitions.
I let Grub install to the MBR. I just wanted to leave Windows and wasn't interested
in the media DVD stuff.
Whilst I'm trawling for advice: I can't seem to get a consensus on the
size of the swap partition. I have 2gb of ram. How much of an issue
is swap?
I set mine to 2G I think. I have 2G RAM also.
Mike
--
Michael Lake
Computational Research Support Unit
Science Faculty, UTS
Ph: 9514 2238
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