Disk partitions

[Pongo A. Pan]

On Mon, 2011-02-14 at 12:06 +0000, Jorge Gusmao wrote:
> I can see now that I forgot to include de image disks.png (will
> include it later on)
> Anyway, my disk configuration has allready 3 or 4 primary partitions
> on disk 1 > System > OS (windows) > HP recovery > Storage > other i
> cant remember.
> 
> 
This is typical for HP laptops now: 4 primary partitions, the last of
which is a very small one labeled "HP TOOLS."  I suppose one of the
motivations for doing this is to make it harder for people to install
other operating systems.

We bought one of these last month and simply saved the contents of HP
TOOLS to an external drive.  Brave hardware oriented wife then booted
with either parted magic or systemrescue cd (can't remember; they're
both wonderful), used gparted to shrink the windows 7 partition, moved
the rest down and created an extended partition.  The first logical
partition in the extended was labeled HP TOOLS and got the saved
contents.  Apparently, the repair system finds it by disk label and
doesn't care if it is actually on partition 4 or partition 5 (the first
logical partition).  

We installed Mint 9 (an Ubuntu 10.04 respin) on on the rest of the
logical partition space with the simple /, swap, /home layout.  As
others have written, linux doesn't care where it boots from and no
longer needs /boot to be at the beginning of the disk.  Since this is an
LTS version we're pretty much done for the commercial life of the
laptop. 

We were strongly tempted to just wipe nasty Win7 off entirely, but what
the heck, we paid the Microsoft tax so we might as well have it.  It is
really annoying to use with all of HP's nanny stuff constantly reminding
you that your machine is in terrible danger.  Our taxes are very
complicated so I need a full-blown bare metal installation of tax
software; I'm working with it on this HP laptop now.  After I get my DCN
I doubt I'll boot Win7 again until next tax time.

Jorge, courage! it can be done.

--
pongo