Laptop Partition Concerns - SOLVED

Question

Hi there,
I'm going to be installing Arch on my laptop (well aware of the minefield that is closed hardware and an ATI dual graphics card) alongside windows 7 as there are some features which are not as well implemented; editing .NEF files, for one! Cursory defence of my maintaining a windows partition over, now I get to the real issue;
The laptop I have is an HP, and as such the hard drive come with 4 partitions already on the disk, these being
SYSTEM,
C:
RECOVERY (D:)
HP_TOOLS
I've already freed up some 100GB on the hard drive to accomodate the Arch install, however, I'm led to believe that you cannot have more than 4 primary partitions, and all of the above are primary. As I was planning to have 3 linux partitions;
swap
/home (with symlinks to C:\user\ to make up for a lack of space)
I'm aware that I can delet HP_TOOLS with little disruption to my windows install, but that still then only leaves me with one free partition on the hard drive (I've been led to believe), so I wouldn't be able to have a separate /home partition from my root partition?
If this is too poorly written, or I've missed any similar posts, hopefully I can clarify or be redirected! (I'm not a total newb re: disk partitioning, however, it will be the first time I've dual booted from the same hard drive, rather than having 2 HDDs, one for each OS!)
Thanks
civint
Last edited by civint (2012-07-31 13:46:14)

Answer 1

To be perfectly honest of there were any serious faults with windows I have no problems just reinstalling it (I own a legal copy which I had installed on a desktop pc just after W7 was released) which would also mean I would be free of HP bloatware which comes as default. As far as I'm aware I can get around not having the HP_TOOLS by using some HP software to make a copy of some of that stuff on DVD or what have you.
As far as partitioning goes, it seems to make more sense to convert to GPT rather than faff about with different types of partition (at least to me, although using GRUB2 might pose a few issues with that, but fortunately the wiki seems pretty exhaustive on that matter - one of the reasons I feel safe about trying out Arch!)
@Perbh I've had that happen before, admittedly with ubuntu systems a while back, and it never seemed too much hassle to just reset it all from a live CD or a system recovery disk based on linux, so I don;t mind too much about that! I've had more issues not being able to boot windows alongside linux (after a fluffed linux setup messed up the boot manager, and then windows couldn't figure find ANY of the partitions, although THAT was fixed by use of a recovery CD (I have my windows 7 install disc to hand, so no worries there either, really).
My only misgiving would be that changing to a GPT rather than the MBR would make life a lot more complicated when installing grub2, as I would be inclined to do, since it's more up to date software, although as far as I can tell it's not overly complex going by the instructions from https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gr … structions, I just have to be careful when I'm partitioning! Which, to be honest, I would probably do prior to running the Arch install, just to ensure I have the partitions where I want them on the disk, to end up with something along the lines of;
[SYSTEM]  [C:]  [REVOVERY]  [D:]  [HP_TOOLS] ¦ [swap] [EF02 for GRUB2] [/]  [/home]
Hopefully this would still allow me to still boot windows, and then install Arch (with grub2) on a GPT (assuming I got the theory right as far as grub2 on a BIOS-GPT install)
thanks all for prompt aid!