SZ Drive Partitioning?

Hello NotebookReview Forum Friends,

I've successfully burned recovery DVDs and completed a semi-restore from them (which removed the factory-installed recovery partition) so I feel prepared to partition off half of my 100GB drive (in my new SZ240P) for a dual-boot configuration.

I have booted from a Gentoo 2006.0 LiveCD successfully and `dmesg` showed that the hard drive was correctly identified at /dev/sda as a SATA Seagate Model: ST9100824AS with 100030MB. It recognized the single (NTFS) partition as sda1 but then was unable to mount the drive as either read/write or just read-only.

My question is: Has anyone been able to add partitions to their SZ internal drive and if so, did you have to do something peculiar to enable the drive to be written to by external partitioning utilities? Like is there some BIOS drive security feature I need to disable or something?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

-Pip

 

hmm It seems Gentoo's installer cannot cope with the NTFS partition that the recovery discs create. It recognized it and then after rebooting, gave warnings that the partition type was unknown. I cleared all drive partitions and then the installation process hung when trying to format a new NTFS partition so rebooting again, I made a 32GB Fat32 partition and instructed the installer not to try to format it and now installation is proceeding fine on an XFS partition at the end of the drive. Maybe it's just fickle and persistence will overcome... or repeated modifications of the partition table cycle through corrupt and crash-worthy to manageable and writeable.

Anyway, my Portage tree is syncing and hopefully I'll be dual-booting Gentoo GNU/Linux and Windows XP Pro soon. Please still feel free to explain whatever you know or offer advice as I'd like to understand the underlying problems more thoroughly if possible. Thanks.

-Pip

 

Damn! The recovery disks force a format of the whole drive so I can't dual-boot unless I get a separate set of WinXP installation discs (which would be able to install in just an existing partition). =( I guess I'll probably just get an external drive and enclosure to keep Gentoo and WinXP totally distinct. It'd be fscking cool if the machine could boot off a Memory Stick Pro Duo. Does anyone know if that is feasible? Also, does the GeForce Go 7400 in the SZ use PCI-Express or just regular PCI? Thanks.

-Pip

 

Would something like Partition Magic work to create the new partition?

 

Partition Magic 8 worked great for me. Created a new partition and resized the old one (preserving data). You are supposed to back up first, though, and that's good advice (but I didn't bother).

I created a new partition so I could dual boot with Vista beta 2, so I can't offer any advice regarding whether Gentoo will like the partition.