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
