Hello Daniel, Jason & Andrew Miller, On Sat, 2012-02-25 at 19:52 +1100, Jason White wrote:
Daniel Jitnah <djitnah@greenwareit.com.au> wrote:
IF it was my machine it would never have booted into win7 and it would be all Linux from day 0. You get the feeling its specifically configured with 4 partitions so as to make Linux install difficult.
There used to be a practice, as I recall, of implementing part of what's usually in the BIOS in software stored in one of the partitions of a laptop's hard drive. I'm hoping those days are long gone and that if you destroyed all of the supplied partitions on one of these machines and installed Linux, it would boot reliably.
If the hard drive can be easily field removed and refitted (like on the Thinkpad I am using), then use two hard drives. Alternatively, use an external USB drive as your non Windows drive. USB3 should be less painfully slow. That way, it is possible to relatively closely inspect the existing Windows installation, without risk of damage, along with being able to run Linux. It might be possible to run almost entirely from a USB memory stick for the Linux install, with some form of overlay file system for changed files to avoid too much writing to the memory stick. Regards, Mark Trickett