Re: Compaq Laptops and their Hard Drives
On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 01:08:40PM +0100, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Monday 19 March 2001 20:16, Roger Shaffer wrote:
> > 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?
>
> At a company I used to work for we were all issued with Compaq laptops. With
> mine I reduced the size of the Windows partition and happily ran dual-boot
> Linux and Win98 with no problems.
>
> Some of my colleagues tried making it all Linux and had some rather nasty
> problems. My impression was that the Compaq laptop BIOS wants something
> special on the hard drive (as Compaq Desktop's used to do in the 80's).
>
> I never had a need to track this down properly (I wanted dual-boot).
>
Yep, the Compaq's installs a proprietary partition on the HDD of about 200MB and put their own bios management tools on it. Dell does this too. As long as you leave this partition alone [it shows up as unknown type], and only delete the windoze partitions before creating your linux partitions, you should be alright.
jc
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