[Debian-eeepc-devel] Installing squeeze on 1005PE

Laurentiu Pancescu lpancescu at googlemail.com
Sat Mar 20 07:50:27 UTC 2010


On Fri, 2010-03-19 at 11:36 -0400, David L. Johnson wrote:
> Laurentiu Pancescu wrote:
> 
> Many notebooks and netbooks have hidden partitions created by the 
> original installation, which contain software for things like special 
> hardware controllers, basic restoration of factory configurations, and 
> the like.  When you re-partitioned, you probably noticed more partitions 
> than you expected.  Looks like they stuck their little package in an 
> extended partition.

Might be, although when I booted into Windows 7 to perform a BIOS update
(I read that's a good idea before installing squeeze), I saw two
partitions, C: (where Windows was installed), and an empty partition D:.
fdisk didn't seem to think there was anything special with the
partitions.  It saw sda1 and sda5 (living in the extended partition
sda2), both NTFS, not hidden or anything.

When I tell the installer I want to use the entire disk for Debian, then
it should discard anything in the partition table, hidden or not.
Installation failing in such a situation is a bug, IMHO.  I'm not sure
if this works any better if you want to reduce the Windows partition,
and install Debian in parallel (i.e. dual-boot).

> 
> Bad news is that you blew away whatever software the manufacturer wanted 
> there, but that doesn't matter unless you wanted to keep the Windows 
> that the thing probably came with.  It probably doesn't matter much even 
> if you do want to keep Windows.

Well, it seems that ExpressGate is missing now (it started when pressing
the left power button).  That's a quick-starting Linux environment for
browsing or so... I didn't like it, to be honest, but other people
might.  I'd like to see the Moblin improvements in the boot time coming
to Debian, though. :)

Best regards,
Laurențiu





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