SatelliteA350D-BA3.​Not sure if right forum.Hidd​en partition.​Can I erase and re-merge?I​DEandAHCI?

Question

Hi. I am fairly new. Not sure if this is the right forum for this question. I plan to re-install the OS on my laptop and fix some hidden partitions on my hard-drive. I have soem questions and some questions about using the eSATA feature on the drive, or eSATA with the expantion cards.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ 2Ghz, 3Gb RAM, Vista Home Premium 64-bit Service Pack 2, ATI 3100. Toshiba Satellite A350D - BA3, AMD QL-62 processor
1. I have a Toshiba Satellite A350D - BA3. There was 1 hidden partition, and 1 that had the back-up and was erased with a previous install. Can I erase and re-merge the hidden partition? How can I see what is on the hidden partition? It is small. From the research I did, it is probably system files only. I made a dvd-rom back-up already, and have used it once. In XP this is how I looked at other ones, I have Vista on the laptop and it is pretty much the same. I looked in control panel - administrative tools - computer management - disk management. I can delete and merge partitions then re-partition: I would need to hook the HDD in the laptop to an external enclosure, then use these features in XP or another OS. Or is there another way?
- I want the whole HDD for the laptop formatted as one drive. But I don't want to render my laptop useless.
2. With this laptop does the BIOS need to be confugured as AHCI so the eSATA port and eSATA features can be accessed? On my desktop and this particular motherboard, that is the case. I have IDE on my desktop and it cannot access certain eSATA features without AHCI or RAID configuration. An Asus M3N78-VM if your curious. This is a new idea I have come across, and havn't even used the eSATA port on my laptop yet. I want to be able to use it. What about AHCI drivers? With the motherboard for my desktop I need a floppy drive to install them. Are they included with Vista? I have been told and read that Vista does/does not include these drivers. I assume that the eSATA port will work on the laptop automatically, and I don't need to worry about this.
3. Anyone know why this laptop does not show up when I search the Toshiba site? I cannot find this model number.
4. Anyone know how easy/safe the bios flash is for this model? I found the last one I believe they made for it, but I had a failed one and did not want to do that to my laptop since that is a waste of money. I don't like windows bios updates.
Any help is appriciated.
Thank you.

Answer 1

So this will completely overwrite any of the steps in this process?
sudo gdisk /dev/disk0
If you get any error messages at this point, report the error messages, don't proceed further.
You're now in gdisk interactive mode. Menus/commands are single characters followed by return/enter. So type ? and <enter> and you'll get the main menu listing commands. Type p <enter> and it will print (display) the current GPT. Since you have 5 GPT entries, you can't use a 1 for 1 GPT to MBR scheme like Apple does. The following suggestion is safe, but all hybrid MBRs are non-standard inventions, and therefore I can't tell you how Boot Camp Assistant or Disk Utility will react to this hybrid MBR should you decide to make changes later. What I can tell you is Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X themselves have no problem with this MBR scheme.
r <enter>        go to the recovery & transformation menu
h <enter>        create a new hybrid MBR
5 <enter>        add partion 5 to the MBR
<enter>          accept the default MBR hex code of 07
y <enter>        set the bootable flag
n <enter>        do not protect more partitions
o < enter>       print (display) the MBR
You should have two entries. One type EE, one 07, with the 07 entry marked with * under Boot. If you don't, report back. If you do, write out the update partition information, and hope  a power failure doesn't occur for the next few seconds...
w <enter>     write partition table to disk
reboot. hold down option - you should be able to boot into either Mac HD, Recovery HD, or Windows.
I just tested this same five partition GPT and 2 partition MBR on a working system and the instructions above worked.
Note, so long as CSM-BIOS and thus MBR are required for Boot Camp instead of EFI booting Windows, we're stuck with flaky MBR problems, as well as the 2TB disk limitation for Windows boot disks.
If so, problem solved, thanks!