trying to install mandrake linux on my laptop

[Cristatus]

first, when i entered the installation program, it said

partitions secter #778135908 (544GB) and sector #168689522 (923GB) are overlapping

and i got this message several times. the only problem with this is that, my sole hard drive in the laptop is only 120GB, and i don't even know whether the error message should be a problem or not


also, my laptop is the Acer 1714SMi, and apparently it has three partitions, whereas in windows it shows up as only two.
the first on is called ACER which is the C:\ partition, which is the primary drive. it is of NTFS type.
the second one, D:\ is called ACERDATA, which i suppose is used to back up data to reinstall in the event of a sytems failure of some kind. only 1.30GB of the available 9.75GB on that partition (FAT32 file system) has been used. i was wondering if anyone has any experience with what the drive is actually used for, and whether it is actually safe to install my installation of Mandrake Linux on to the partition by deleting everything on it.
the third partition is actually hidden on windows, and i only found out about it when i was about to delete the D:\ partition. that partition is W95FAT16 format, and has only 7.8MB, but is hidden. any idea what that could be used for, and whether it is safe to delete the partition? (i just checked in PartitionMagic, and the label of the drive is ACER_SERVIC, and the drive letter is *:\ )

 

[drag]

You have something like BIOS suspend

some laptops have a special partition were they will dump memory to when you want to go to sleep. Is something that happens at the BIOS level and is fairly OS independant. Basicly your memory contents are writen to the partition and your machine is shutdown, when you restore your system it turns the computer on and recongizes how it got shutdown and then reads the contents of that partitoin back into RAM and then your back to your OS like nothing ever happenned.

Also laptops may have special partitions that will hold the Windows installation files that are used when you restore the laptop. It cuts down on the cost of making cdroms for them, I guess.

I don't know in your case what is going on, of course.

The little hidden partition probably holds some diagnostic and/or configuration tools that may or may not be required for whatever reason. Before formatting it or anything like that you'd probably check online and make sure that you can obtain and install copies. Probably has a little dos install like MS-DOS or FreeDOS.

Check out linux on laptops.net and see what issues people have run into with your's or a similar laptop...

I don't know how serious the "overlapping" thing is... Not sure what that means. Normally I'd just go from a boot disk and go:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
and wipe the thing clean, but you probably don't want to do that with your windows partitions and what those extra little hidden thing is used for.

 

[Cristatus]

AFAIK, the bigger partition is used for restoring, as you correctly mentioned. but the thing is, i have a couple of CDs as well, and i'm not sure if the CDs have the same thing has whats on the partition.

what does the:
dd if=/dev/zero or=/dev/hda
do exactly?

 

[drag]

It completely wipes your harddrive. Zero'ing it out. Often incorrectly refered to as a low level format.

Guess I should of mentioned that.

It's what you do when you have messed partitoins or something like that. Sometimes things can be so far gone that the partitioning tools can't correctly deal with the situation, this is a easy fix.

Also it's a good way to test a harddrive. If you have screwed up sectors it will choke and fail part way thru. If it works correctly it will only give a error once it's out of space to fill up with zeroes. (reached the end of the harddrive.)

go "man dd" once you get linux going.

 

[Cristatus]

what's man dd? lol, sorry for all the questions, but i still haven't installed Mandrake yet.

erm, did i forget to mention that i wanted to dual boot with XP? oops...

i was also wondering if it would be possible to run linux off of a USB drive. i'm going to get a hard drive sleeve for my older HDDs, and use them as a secondary/backup drive, or if possible, as a whole drive to run linux from.

 

[drag]

USB is probably going to be pretty slow (unless it's usb 2.0), but you should be able to do it.

It may make things more complicated, though. Your bios would have to be able to use a USB device to boot off of, either that you'd have to setup a /boot partition on your motherboard and use that to boot off of and pass the correct kernel parameters to tell it to use a partition on the USB drive as root. This is getting towards the 'it's possible if you know what your doing" type thing, I don't know if installers will be able to automate everything for you, it'd probably be best just to stick with the standard harddrive install for the first time using Linux.

Linux itself is very maliable. You can make it do anything you want, if you know enough to figure out how to do it.

Man dd is a command you'd run from a terminal (called also CLI or shell). Check out the "introduction to linux" guide from the link in my sig.

If you want to try out linux with no headache check out knoppix and simply boot linux off of the cdrom instead of the harddrive.

As far as the restore partitions go and the installation cdroms, it's hard to be completely sure without looking at the contents of the Windows cds. Look for the i386 folders and such, in that folder shoul d contain everything you need to install the windows OS. Maybe e-mail Acer and ask for certain, or they may have some online resources at their website.

Ask them something like "if I replace my harddrive with a new one will I still be able to install my Windows OS on it?", "Or I need to format my harddrive what do I need to reinstall Windows with a blank harddrive?"

Not sure.

 

[Cristatus]

i think i'll take your idea of giving acer a call and seeing what their reply would be, but now i am completely out of time 🙁 tests and assignments and sh1t like that are due this week; but i'll try and do it for next week and tell you what has happened.