Hi folks,
Have an interesting problem. I have a compaq armada 7400 that has a hidden partition for compaq's bios software. My hard drive is dying and I need to replace it. If I install linux on the hard drive, will I be able to copy the compaq partition onto a new hard drive? Or, how would you suggest getting anew hard drive to work with com@%$!@paq?

-Chris

It is possible you can download a CD (recovery tools CD) that does everything the partition does which allows you to delete the partition (I have done this for older compaqs). You may also have a second larger partition holding the Operating System if your notebook did not come with the OS CD. If so, you should be able to burn it onto CD's which is the best thing to do to have a copy of the original OS in the event of HDD failure.
You should visit hp.com and select, software & driver downloads, then insert your notebook model number to dig into what is available.

Compaq - yep I remember them. IIRC my first PC was one of theirs, and could only use a Compaq keyboard. Which were, of course, as expensive as poison.
That partition seems to be only for accessing/updating the BIOS. Do you really need to ???.
If it were me, I'd just use dd the partition across. If that don't work, just ignore it.