PTrenholme

Thankyou for your input. This might sound rude? But IMHO you have not defeated the recovery partition by leaving it alone?
Which might be very smart.

to Anyone

What I am looking for, is some kind soul, who has made good backups of their mbr, extended partitions, recovery partitions etc and deleted
a true recovery partition and any other hidden partitions that may be invoked by HP, Asus, Dell etc
started a new partition table and installed linux only on their laptop and NOT had any issues in doing so ?

Such a person, with luck, has access to a full hard drive and no booting issues?

Or am I still too confusing in asking my question?

You dont need the recovery partition, it is something used by manufactures to cut costs. my HP laptop came with one, instead of the proper reinstall disks. I actually had to pay extra for those. Most manufactures dont hide the partition they just deny access to it.

If you are absolutely concerned about saving the partition use norton ghost you can make a complete image of the hard drive on a disk to recover it if anything goes wrong.

Using a normal vista or XP install disk you can delete those partitions and do a clean install on the system, and setup the partitions however you want. Vista can also resize partitions on the fly (I have never used this though.)

I have also installed both ubuntu and opensuse in a dual boot configuration with vista. with opensuse I had issues with grub getting stuck in a loop. when I installed ubuntu, I used vista's bootloader and didnt have any issues. In both cases I still had the recovery partition inplace.

another thought, and I am sure manufactures dont want to mention. if your hard drive ever dies what good is a recovery partition going to do you anyway? Just order the disks delete partition. Thats just me though.

Well, that's me.
I wiped vista, the recovery partition(s) and everything.
Repartitioned the disk.
Installed linux to the whole disk (all 160GB - a laptop) and am happy.

100% Correct.

Whyever did you think there might be a problem?

Whoops - double post.

Sorry, I should have mentioned this. The "Recovery Partition" had a lot of free space on it.As you can see, only 10GB of the 12GB they allocated was used. So I back up my critical Vista information (mostly drivers, mail and applications) there so I can restore them if I ever need to re-install Vista. Of course, if the actual drive goes bad, that's not much protection. Now that I've installed a second HD in the laptop, I'll probably rethink my backup strategy. I already backup my Kubuntu to the Fedora drive and the fedora to the Kubuntu one, so I think putting a full Vista backup on the Fedora drive might be a "good thing." (Of course, when Vista gets infected it might be better to just wipe it and forget about it.)

As to elimination of the recovery partition, etc. , as I said in my first post, I overwrote the Microsoft MBR with a GRUB MBR, and, therefore, when the BIOS boots from the first HD the MiniNT in the recovery partition is ignored. That means that the presence or absence of that partition is irrelevant to the system opperation. (Note that GRUB -- as indicated in the Kubuntu menu.lst I posted above -- boots Vista directly, bypassing the recovery checks entirly.)

So my answer to your question would be:

1) Safe approche
1a) Purchace a new HD that can replace the HD in your laptop. (My laptop came with a second, empty, drive bay. Filling it with a 320GB SATA drive cost about $100.)
1b) Download and burn a LiveCD for the distribution of your choice. Verify that it has the correct check sums and boots on your system.
1c) Replace your HD with the new one.
1d) Boot from the LiveCD and install the distribution of your choice.

2) Cheaper, somewhat less safe:
2a) Download and burn a LiveCD for the distribution of your choice. Verify that it has the correct check sums and boots on your system.
2b) Backup your HD to a set of DVDs. Verify the backups.
2c) Boot from the LiveCD and install the distribution of your choice, deleting and replacing all partition on your HD.

The bottom line is that, when the MBR that the laptop BIOS boots from points to something other than the MiniNT "recovery" partition, that partition is no longer needed and you can do with it as you wish.

<edit>
Oh, as to actual experience, I followed the steps in procedure (1) with my prior laptop (a Gateway with XP installed) with one change: I used a Fedora installation DVD instead of a LiveCD. I put the drive I pulled into a USB drive enclosure ($20) and still have it around for use if I need it.
</edit>

tredegar

woo hoo

Now some specifics please.

When you get a chance you say what laptop you have please.

Did you have 2 partitions like 2damncommon?

Can you remember if any of those pesky partitions had been hidden from vista?

Can you remember how you wiped your drive?
eg just used a live cd to create a new partition table or did you zero it etc?

Anything else that you would like to add I think will be greatly appreciated.

I intend to use your reply, if you do not mind, to link to old posts that I can find later. Trust me, this is the first reply that suggests
to me it has been defeated in the context of my last question.

Once again thanks for your time.

cheerio

The one that had vista on it was a sony vaio, nicer than my current vaio VGN-FS415M (which I have also wiped "Recovery" and "windowsXP" partitions from) but I don't remember the model number. I could find out if you really need to know.
I can't remember: I took one look at vista, then just wiped them :)
When the installer runs the disk partitioner: Delete all the current partitions, then create three new ones for / , swap and /home. Format them. Then install. It was easy !

Well, if you use my "replace the HD" solution, the partition question is, obviously, not an issue.

My current laptop is an HP dv9710us (AMD x86_64 dual core, 3GB RM, 160GB SATA HD, 17" screen, nVidia chip-set). As far as I can recall, the "Recovery" partition was not hidden, and the BIOS booted the MiniNT in the recovery partition which did its "thing" and then booted the "real" Vista partition.

As soon as I got it home, before I purchased the second drive, I used the Kubuntu LiveCD to shrink the Vista partition to 80GB, install Kubuntu, and replace the MBR that HP had installed with GRUB's MBR. The only problem I had was that the nvidia video driver in the Kubuntu did not support the newer nVidia chip-set in the laptop, so I had to use the vesa driver 'till I could get the system up and running.

At that point, I had a dual-boot system so I could download packages I need for Kubuntu using Vista and (after I installed IFS on Vista and ntfs-3g on Kubuntu) use the whole drive from either system.

But the "recovery partition" problem never presented itself to me as a problem since I no longer booted the MiniNT in the "recovery" partition unless I chose to do so.

My prior laptop (a Gateway Mx6534 (?) IIRC) did, at first, seem to have the "recovery partition" problem, and, when I first installed Fedora 8 on it, I had to set up a "boot.ini" entry to boot the Linux system from XP. (You can, of course, do this in Vista if you create a C:\BOOT.INI file, since Vista will use it if it exists.) But, when I decided to replace the 80GB drive that came with the laptop with a 160GB one, I discovered that my "solution 1" procedure worked quite well, and the "recovery partition" problem never again appeared.

I'm not 100% certain, but pretty sure my ASuS never had a manufacturer installed recovery partition, only that backup partition. I bought it from a small local firm/shop that mostly build their own systems - I got my other two computers from them - and they created the backup partition. This ASuS is a slightly used ex-display model, and like I said, came with 3 CD-ROMs: the XP Pro install disk, a drivers disk, and one with assorted software.