Compaq Laptops and their Hard Drives

[Roger Shaffer <rashaffer@sprintmail.com>]

I have a Compaq Presario 1640 laptop that happily ran Linux in a
dual-boot situation for the last year and a half.  Recently the hard
drive failed and, once it was replaced, I thought it would be a perfect
opportunity to reclaim some disk space and reinstall only Linux.
Unfortunately, Compaq does some wierd proprietary partitioning things to
the hard drive and BIOS so that any installation of just Linux leaves me
with a working copy that will give all sorts of write past sector and
data corruption errors.  Compaq is less than forthcoming about how to
overcome this.  

So, has anyone had success installing Linux on a Compaq laptop?  If so,
how did you overcome the partition issue?  

Thanks,
Roger Shaffer Jr.
rashaffer@sprintmail.com