[SWLUG] Accessing hard drive partitions

[Philip Downer]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 03:55:01AM +0100, Rhys Sage wrote:
> I'm working with a HP a705w which seems to have a very
> interesting partition. It's got a windows recovery
> partition of 5gb. Rather than provide the user with an
> XP recovery/reinstallation disk, the bios allows
> reinstallation from the secondary partition. Thus far
> I've been unable to access the data on the secondary
> partition. Any ideas? I'd like to be able to write the
> 700mb of the secondary partition to CD so that I can
> format that and use it for Linux. 

A quick bit of googling tells me that a) most windows recovery
partitions are fat32 so should you really want to look at it then it
wouldn't be very hard to do so b) that you shouldn't touch, move, resize
or delete this partition c) that you may need to make a boot floppy if
you ever need to recover from that partition again after installing
Linux and wiping out the windows MBR.

I don't use windows so I would just format the entire hard disk, it
sounds like you wouldn't want to do this so you are probably stuck with
that 5gb partition.

Note: it took me longer to write this reply than it did to find the info
on google, you might want to learn to use search engines and try them
first for speedier and more accurate responses.

Phil.