On 19/09/12 07:02, Guus Snijders wrote:
2012/9/18 Robbie Smith <zoqaeski@xxxxxxxxx>:
Hi everyone
TL;DR: I've just bought a new HP Pavilion g6-2103ax, and I'm having
difficulties trying to figure out how I can dual-boot it with Windows 7
(which was preinstalled).
Windows *still* defaults to using MBR partitions, and even though the system
is UEFI, HP have used some trickery somewhere to make it boot from BIOS. To
make matters worse, the disk table already has four partitions:
SYSTEM: 199 MB NTFS
Windows C drive: ~ 450 GB NTFS
HP Recovery partition: 18.5 GB NTFS
HP_TOOLS: 99 MB FAT32
[...]
Hmm, i'd guess that the recovery partition is bootable, so it's best
not to modify it too much. The HP_Tools partition is probably just a
data partition (and not a very interesting one, but ymmv).
First of; do you have (or can you create) a recovery disk in case all
goes wrong?
There might be a way to repartition the drive without losing features:
1. Resize the Windows "C" partition to free up space. Either
defragment first or use windows's diskpart utitility.
2. move (don't delete!) the recovery partition next to the resized
Windows partition.
Now the tricky part:
3. either create an image of the tools partition or write down the
*exact* sectors it's using and the partition type number.
4. create a new extended partition in the free space, size: all available.
5a. create a logical partition using the type and sectors written down
at step 3 OR
5b. create a logical partition of the same type and size as written
down at step 3 and restore the image to this part.
6. If you used step 5a, move this (new!) logical partition to the
beginning of the free space. This is important for Windows drive
letters (not sure).
7. Use the rest of the extended partition to create your Linux partitions.
I'm not sure where the bootloader fits in best in the scenario, but
that shouldn't be too hard.
When you boot up Windows after all this, you might want to delete the
driveletters it will probably create for the Linux partitions to avoid
accidentally formatting them ;).
Hope that helps.
Note: this is just theoretical. It might work or it might not work...
mvg,
Gus
I can delete the recovery partition, as I've got the "recovery" (AKA
factory reset) disks from HP under warranty. The HP_TOOLS partition is
at the end of the disk, so in theory I can't add an extended partition
before it, as extended partitions are meant to be the last in the table.
Although on this Samsung netbook I've got an extended partition as the
third (marked with *) of four primaries, so it seems to work:
# parted
GNU Parted 3.1
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) p
Model: ATA Hitachi HTS54323 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 320GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 106MB 105MB primary ntfs
2 106MB 98.9GB 98.8GB primary ntfs
* 3 98.9GB 303GB 205GB extended
* 5 98.9GB 233GB 134GB logical ntfs
* 6 233GB 233GB 57.5MB logical ext2 boot
* 7 233GB 303GB 70.0GB logical lvm
4 303GB 320GB 16.6GB primary ntfs diag
Using that as a guide I could set up the new laptop in a similar way.
It's a shame HP and Microsoft made it so difficult, and after this
little episode I'm beginning to suspect that the real reason Microsoft
is pushing Secure Boot is because UEFI+GPT makes it much easier to
install multiple operating systems on a machine without conflicts, but
Secure Boot will require an authorised and signed key, and guess who
will control the key distribution…
