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).
A diagram of this setup is on the mediadirect link below ([1]).
I've got various Dell Latitudes.
My usual layout is
- GRUB in MBR
- Dell utility partition
- Linux /boot (2nd partition)
- LVM partition containing
- Linux swap
- Linux /
- DVD player
I don't bother with a Windows Xp partition these days as
VMWare is much more convenient.
Once I've got the machine running I dd and compress the
image of the Dell utility partition. Dell want you to
run this before reporting a hardware fault, so it's
useful to be able to restore it.
I then drop FreeDOS into that partition and use it as
the operating system for BIOS updates. This makes
BIOS updates painless -- unzip file, copy it to FreeDOS
partition, boot.
If you're tight of space I'd just delete the partition.
You can use the CD image for testing for hardware faults
and use FreeDOS from a memory key for BIOS updates.
I create swap double the amount of RAM that can possibly
be installed. Double because 2.4 demanded that and I
got badly burnt when it came out and I had to repartition.
I use the total RAM supported rather than RAM installed
as I upgrade the RAM to the maximum when the RAM price
bottoms out (like DDR RAM is now). That gets an extra
few years out of the machine for very little money.
It's worthwhile keeping the layout simple, as the steeply
falling price of disk means you'll probably want to
upgrade the disk once during the machine's life. I
can't see much point to multiple partitions on a
desktop machine with a single disk spindle.
There's not much benefit nowdays to a distinct /boot
partition, so you could do away with that if you
wanted. I keep it because I'm over 40 and are
getting Volvo-driving urges. Also it's worth
putting /boot into the same partition # as Windows
was, since some idiot software from Dell needs
that.
Similarly, the performance effect of using a file
for swap isn't great. I just like a swap partition
as I know then that the swap is on the fastest part
of the disk.
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