Hi Folks, I understand that many laptops have BIOS-admin and diagnostic programs stored in a "hidden partition" on the hard drive -- usually accessed by pressing a function key during the first stage of booting. Any suggestions about a) How to find out where this partition is (e.g. starting and ending cylinders) -- indeed to find out whether it is there in the first place? b) How to (e.g.) wipe that other OS off the drive and install Linux without affecting this hidden partition? With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Feb-07 Time: 09:47:49 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 09:47 +0000, ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
Hi Folks,
I understand that many laptops have BIOS-admin and diagnostic programs stored in a "hidden partition" on the hard drive -- usually accessed by pressing a function key during the first stage of booting.
Actually the BIOS admin bit is quite rare these days, I think a few of the older Compaq's had that, and my very very old 286 Tosh did. Another reason for a hidden partition was for the old BIOS based hibernate to disk facilities which are no longer relevant.
Any suggestions about
a) How to find out where this partition is (e.g. starting and ending cylinders) -- indeed to find out whether it is there in the first place?
Often it is at the start of the disk.
b) How to (e.g.) wipe that other OS off the drive and install Linux without affecting this hidden partition?
When you use fdisk (or similar) if it exists it will appear either as an unidentified partition or maybe as a small FAT partition. It's not actually hidden as such it's just in the first case Windows won't assign a drive letter to a partition it doesn't know how to read and in the second case they have probably adjusted the Windows installation to not assign a drive letter to the (otherwise standard) partition. If you are really nervous you could take a look from the windows (NT, 2000 or XP) installation by punching services.msc into the start menu run box (or right clicking my computer and selecting "manage") From the management console you could navigate to disk management and look at the partition layout of the disk (including any unidentified or unassigned partitions) If such a partition exists it will be apparent in fdisk regardless of it's type.
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
b) How to (e.g.) wipe that other OS off the drive and install Linux without affecting this hidden partition?
This would probably be easiest if you select to manually configure your disk partitions as part of your Linux installation - most installers I have seen will use the whole disk by default - ymmv. You may want to look at something to take a copy of that partition before performing your install if you are concerned - I have used g4u (http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/) successfully in the past to take a copy of a Dell Diagnostics partition before clearing a drive.
When you use fdisk (or similar) if it exists it will appear either as an unidentified partition or maybe as a small FAT partition. It's not actually hidden as such it's just in the first case Windows won't assign a drive letter to a partition it doesn't know how to read and in the second case they have probably adjusted the Windows installation to not assign a drive letter to the (otherwise standard) partition.
If you are really nervous you could take a look from the windows (NT, 2000 or XP) installation by punching services.msc into the start menu run box (or right clicking my computer and selecting "manage") From the management console you could navigate to disk management and look at the partition layout of the disk (including any unidentified or unassigned partitions)
You will probably find that services.msc will not show you what Wayne expects here - its loosely an M$ equivalent of nix 'ps ax'. Try entering compmgmt.msc to display the equivalent of Manage from the My Computer menu. If you just want an equivalent of cfdisk (or probably closer to qtparted) enter diskmgmt.msc at the Start and Run prompt. You may have to be using an administrator account on the windows machine - can't remember.
If such a partition exists it will be apparent in fdisk regardless of it's type.
HTH, Jim
On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 16:31 +0000, Jim Rippon wrote:
You will probably find that services.msc will not show you what Wayne expects here - its loosely an M$ equivalent of nix 'ps ax'.
Of course you are completely right...dunno what I was thinking at that point. The only defence I have it that at 11:41AM on a Sunday I am only just awake and on my second cup of coffee.
On 2/18/07, Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk> wrote:
On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 09:47 +0000, ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
Hi Folks,
I understand that many laptops have BIOS-admin and diagnostic programs stored in a "hidden partition" on the hard drive -- usually accessed by pressing a function key during the first stage of booting.
Actually the BIOS admin bit is quite rare these days, I think a few of the older Compaq's had that, and my very very old 286 Tosh did.
My very modern Thinkpad still does it! fdisk shows two partitions with Thinkpad factory reset stored in the second. To replace Windows with Linux, just re-tag the first partition as Linux, and run mke2fs on it. Regards, Tim.
Actually the BIOS admin bit is quite rare these days, I think a few of the older Compaq's had that, and my very very old 286 Tosh did.
My very modern Thinkpad still does it!
Really ? I know that the thinkvantage stuff is run from the hard drive when you press the magic blue button at POST, but if this stuff is not present I am pretty sure it just falls back to the BIOS setup rather than the thinkvantage menu. At least that is how my R40 behaved when I removed the original disk.
On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 01:36:38AM +0000, Tim Green wrote:
My very modern Thinkpad still does it!
I'm sure that you are referring to the thinkvantage recovery/diagnostics partition. This is just a bunch of apps to reformat the disk and reinstall windows, you can run diagnostics from it and change the bios settings. You don't need this partition like you did with some of the early stuff that had the actual bios on disk. Indeed if the bios had been on the disk when I got this laptop (and X32) i'd had have been in real trouble as the entire disk was blank and I had to get recovery cd's from ibm. The actual recovery space is 4.6 Gigs and 98% full, in some ways i'd like to ditch it to save disk space but at the same time I figure having the diagnostics tools to hand might save me time if the laptop ever needs repairing. Adam -- jabberid = quinophex@jabber.earth.li
participants (5)
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Adam Bower -
Jim Rippon -
ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Tim Green -
Wayne Stallwood