HP Win7 takes all 4 primary partitions [Solved]

[floyd1982]

he could do all that has been suggested to the user, or He could use the "HP Recovery Manager: to create recovery media for, your PC. "then format the whole drive and start over. option two is get a usb 3 hard drive and install Sabayon Linux on it and leave the windows 7 drive alone.
The quoted material comes from http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/docu ... lc=en&lc=e Security and Support:
The last 3 laptops/netbooks i have gotten in the last 5 years all came without install media. you had to burn your own.
hope this helped.

[kp2george75]

batvink

I used the "Sir" because of my respect for you and the amount of effort that you have been putting into solving my problem of double booting SL7 with factory installed Win7, which occupies all 4 primary partitions on my HD.

I am currently tied up with Seasonal activities and will not be able to attempt to do your recommended hack until early January. I will backup my Win7 system with an image on an external HD (in case something goes wrong) before I start this 13+ step procedure.

Please be advised that I will not hold you responsible in any way for your attempt to help me and I will post, either way, my results.

Thanks, and, Happy Holidays. KP2George75

[batvink]

Well, thank you, kp2george75. and very happy holidays to you too, Sir.

You know, it's allways a plessure, being helpfull, and the effort i'm putting into; it's just something
i like to do. It keeps me sharp on different kinds of problems, and refresh my overal knowledge about Operating Systems. This way, i'm still learning too.
So, thank YOU, Sir, for learning.
I used the "Sir" because of my mutual respect...

[argedion]

The two partitions are needed to help return windows back to its originaly factory state and also for the recovery environment. (Also Have and HP with Win 7) I was able to boot up with Mandriva and Fedora using an external Hard drive. Sabayon is not allowing me to choose my external hard drive as a boot drive. The problem is when I first got the computer I tried to install Mandriva on it however I ended up messing up the boot partition. Not that I actually did anything wrong this is apparently how HP has it setup. Grub is unable to successfull write to the windows boot partition. I initially removed d: and e: and resized c: however It would not boot to Mandriva or Windows. I had to go into recovery mode from the bios boot. Then I had to run recovery Got the system back to normal until I rebooted and got no OS. Grub was removed by the Recovery Process and everything looked normal. I ended up spending about 6 hours searching for some answers to finally get my boot fixed and have windows load up. The best way to install Sabyon with the HP is a way they apparently are not offering. An External Drive. It works flawlessly with Fedora and Mandriva. I really was enjoying the live environment to this and want to install just cant with the setup I have

[kp2george75]

How I solved the problem of installing S7 on my HD for dual booting when all 4 primary partitions were taken for factory installed Win7.
STRATEGY: Take Win7 recovery software off drive D:\ to remove 1 primary partition, then shrink drive C:\. Combine these 2 spaces to make an Extended Partition with Logical Partitions for a Linux installation.

PART A:
1. Make a recovery disk or pen drive for Win7 by going to Control Panel -> Backup & Restore ->Follow directions.
2. On Desktop, click on Run, type "disk management" to bring up Win7's partition manager. Delete recovery volume D:\ to remove 1 primary partition. Save above recovery disk to restore Win7 if ever needed.
3. Defrag drive C:\, then use Win7's partition mgr to "shrink" that primary partition to produce a new "raw" unformated space.
4. Highlight the new "raw" space, right click on it and select "new simple volume" wizard. This will automatically combine unallocated space from the deleted recovery partition D: with the new raw space from Drive C: to make one larger unformated space. Set this volume label as "Extended Partition". Do not assign a drive letter and do not format. Since the Win7 partition mgr is limited in re-sizing and formatting choices, go to Part B below.

PART B:
5. Boot the computer with Pmajic, G-Parted, or your other favorite live partition manager.
6. Define the new recovered space as an Extended Partition and re-size to make as many Logical Partitions you as need for your Linux install. The Logical Partitions can be formatted also when you install S7.

HP Pavilion dv7-6199, Quad Core, 8 G RAM, 1 TB HD, Radeon graphics, Windows 7 Home Premium.

KP2George75