On 07-Nov-05 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 00:13 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
Fortunately I was able to locate on the Compaq web-site versions of these utilities which fitted on floppies, so you could boot from the floppy and do the BIOS setup (the Compaq default of pressing F2 during POST no longer working).
So
a) This may be a point to watch out for.
b) Does anyone have informed comments on this kind of situation?
Yes that used to be a fairly common practise by Compaq and a few others that thankfully seems to have gone away. I can't think of many modern machines that have the bios utility on disk.
What you do find is on machines like Thinkpads there is a hidden restore partition that holds the factory default image (amongst other things). These partitions are almost impossible to recreate without a special disk set that can be ordered from IBM. There are no provided disks to restore this partition from. The partition on mine also has some diagnostics etc which are accessed with the Access IBM blue button. So you are best leaving that alone as even if you never intend to put the laptop back to factory installation the diagnostics etc are handy. *
On older machines you may also find a strange partition that is part of a legacy bios hibernation feature, no modern OS that I can think of needs this and usually there is a downloadable tool to recreate it if you do end up needing it. Older Toshiba's have this.
- This has always amazed me, First we had the situation where almost
nothing comes with a real OS installation disk any more, only those factory recovery disks. Now we get machines that come with no disks at all, what is the point I ask in providing a restore image on the same drive whose failure is the most common reason to need said image. Acer's do at least pop up a utility on first boot to burn the image to CD, but why they can't spend the extra 10p and put a restore disk in the box is beyond me.
Thanks for these comments, Wayne. Useful; and it indicates that some sort of hidden partition (or even two) is a possibiity to watch out for, whether for BIOS, Restore, or a system-state swap for hibernation.
(I've wondered shat Windows, with APM set up, does about the hibernation partition if it's been over-run by a Linux installation?)
Anyway, a possible suggestion and another question.
I've become a great fan of "Linux on a Floppy", aka "Tom's RTBT". See
This packs an amzing collection of useful Linux stuff onto a single bootable floppy, and it's great for diagnostic and testing purposes.
Suggestion: make a Tomsrtbt floppy and have it by you. It may come in handy.
Question: In this case, you have a laptop with Windows on it, you're about to install Linux, and you're now wondering whether there are any of these "stealth" partitions on there. I don't know how, on the hard drive, such partitions are defined, but presumably they should be standard partition-table compatible.
In that case, if before foing anything else, you booted up from Linux on a Floppy (which won't touch the hard drive unless you ask it to), then by running fdisk (carefully ... ) you should see any such partitions when you do 'p'.
So: Is this the case? Otherwise put: is there anything special about such partitions which would make them invisible to fdisk?
I can imagine, for instance, that when someone puts Windows on a machine for the first time, with APM set up, the Windows installation simply makes sure that the end of its formatted partition space stops short of the physucal end of the disk so that there's a kind of anonymous Limbo into which Windows simply squirts a binary image of the system state on hibernation (sort of 'dd' equivalent).
In that case, you wouldn't know it was there without doing arithmetic on the partition sizes, since it souldn't be registered in the partition table. (And if you think that's a weird idea, well I wouldn't put anything past Windows especially given its implicit mindset that it's the only OS in the world, so you couldn't pssibly have anything else on the machine, could you?)
Best wishes, Ted.
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