2012/9/19 Robbie Smith <zoqaeski@gmail.com>:
On 19/09/12 07:02, Guus Snijders wrote:
2012/9/18 Robbie Smith <zoqaeski@gmail.com>:
Hi everyone
TL;DR: I've just bought a new HP Pavilion g6-2103ax, and I'm having difficulties trying to figure out how I can dual-boot it with Windows 7 (which was preinstalled).
Windows *still* defaults to using MBR partitions, and even though the system is UEFI, HP have used some trickery somewhere to make it boot from BIOS. To make matters worse, the disk table already has four partitions:
SYSTEM: 199 MB NTFS Windows C drive: ~ 450 GB NTFS HP Recovery partition: 18.5 GB NTFS HP_TOOLS: 99 MB FAT32
[...]
Hmm, i'd guess that the recovery partition is bootable, so it's best not to modify it too much. The HP_Tools partition is probably just a data partition (and not a very interesting one, but ymmv). First of; do you have (or can you create) a recovery disk in case all goes wrong?
[moving and deleting partitions]
I'm not sure where the bootloader fits in best in the scenario, but that shouldn't be too hard.
[...] I can delete the recovery partition, as I've got the "recovery" (AKA factory reset) disks from HP under warranty. The HP_TOOLS partition is at the end of the disk, so in theory I can't add an extended partition before it, as extended partitions are meant to be the last in the table. Although on this Samsung netbook I've got an extended partition as the third (marked with *) of four primaries, so it seems to work: [...] Using that as a guide I could set up the new laptop in a similar way.
Indeed. In fact an extended partition is just a "special" primary partition. In theory a single (MBR) harddisk could just as easily have 4 extended partitions.
It's a shame HP and Microsoft made it so difficult, and after this little episode I'm beginning to suspect that the real reason Microsoft is pushing Secure Boot is because UEFI+GPT makes it much easier to install multiple operating systems on a machine without conflicts, but Secure Boot will require an authorised and signed key, and guess who will control the key distribution…
I'm still not entirely sure what the real benefits of GPT are, but that's another discussion. That they made a it a bit more difficult; no argument there. I guess they assume users never touch the partition table anyway. As for secure boot: Redhead/Fedora were working (or perhaps already having) a secure bootloader. It would't be too hard to install that and use it to boot ArchLinux. ;) mvg, Guus