HP Appoints New VP for Open Source, Linux (eWeek) [LWN.net]

HP Appoints New VP for Open Source, Linux (eWeek)

Posted Jan 15, 2006 7:41 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: HP Appoints New VP for Open Source, Linux (eWeek) by nbecker
Parent article: HP Appoints New VP for Open Source, Linux (eWeek)

The system that comes pre-installed probbly has a hidden partition with a rescue copy of the OS on it. Not to mention a partition layed up for hibernation.

If you care paying up slightly more, buy an extra 2.5 HD, remove the original one with the XP an keep it in a safe place (in case you need that warantee). Preferebly do that without accepting any XP license.

Instead, install your extra empty HD and a fresh copy of $FAVORITE_DISTRO, which should opefully work reasonably well.

Ideal solution? no. But this makes you independent of any crazy requirements of the vendor.

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HP Appoints New VP for Open Source, Linux (eWeek)

Posted Jan 15, 2006 14:41 UTC (Sun) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

If anything, you'd think that opening up a laptop and replacing the harddrive would be more likely to void the warranty than switching the OS.

HP Appoints New VP for Open Source, Linux (eWeek)

Posted Jan 15, 2006 15:36 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Not at all.

The rest of the story: after a while I decided someone else's laptop would be better for me. I switched laptops with him. I installed the old HD back to the laptop and moved my linux HD to the new laptop. I had almost zero migration problems and there was still no warantee to void. First laptop was some Dell, socond is a used Compaq of some sort.

Two monthes ago I temporarily switched laptops again with someone who needed my lighter laptop for a time of travel. Again, I switched HD and had a very simple transition, but the poor windows guy has spent a whole day of reinstallations.

Now think who was closer to voiding warantees.

HP rescue partition

Posted Jan 16, 2006 4:30 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

HP ships its computers with rescue partitions, but there's nothing hidden about them. The first partition is a VFAT rescue partion, the second is Windows XP. There's nothing getting in the way of your shrinking the XP partition and installing Linux, leaving you with a dual-boot box. Just make sure, when setting up Grub, that the boot to Windows XP chooses the second partition; if you ever boot the first partition, it will restore the box to its shipped state (it will re-install XP and reset the partition tables to their original configuration).

In fact, I needed the rescue partition, because it seems HP didn't place the boundary between the first two partitions at a cyllinder boundary. The result is that QTParted winds up with an unbootable XP partition. To keep the start of the XP partition in the same place, I had to give the -u option to fdisk, so I could keep the same sector as the start of the partition. Since I wanted a dual-boot box, I just chose the "recovery" option and it restored XP.

This is arguably a bug in QTParted; the user (me) tried to move only the end of the XP partition, but QTParted moved the beginning as well (rounding it off to the nearest cyllinder).