rsink said:
I got this laptop with windows7 preinstalled. Booted a linux DVD to get
to fdisk and got this:
/dev/sda1 63 45062324 22531131 1c Hidden W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 45062325 289249253 122093464+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 289249280 976771071 343760896 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 289251328 976771071 343759872 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb1 2048 488366079 244182016 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2 488366080 976768064 244200992+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
I'm going to allow it one boot into windows just to make the 3 recovery
dvd's before repartitioning everything.
My question is, should the recovery dvd's ever be launched to recover,
what configuration will be restored, exactly what I had before making
the dvd's i.e. as per the above? What if bigger disks are installed by
then, or only one?
Thanks
A safe assumption, is it is going to trash everything.
My small experience, with OS installers, is you can't trust
any of them. They'll always do their "control" thing, attempt
to overwrite the MBR, steal boot control from the other OS, and
so on.
If there is a way for them to damage your goods, they'll find it.
So whatever your plan is, it should include a backup scheme that
prevents anything valuable from being lost. Connect an external disk,
and at least back up well enough, to be able to restore an entire
partition (partition boot sectors and all). Most OSes include the
ability to reinstall their boot loader, to repair "after the fact"
damage. Something like "grub install". On Windows, you've got
your "fixboot", "fixmbr" and the like (the tools on Windows 7
have different names).
A poorly written laptop recovery package, could decide to
repartition the device, so you really have to be prepared
for anything. Since for a naive user, their installer would be
expected to "do everything" for them, there's really no point in
asking the user "do you want me to erase your C:" or the like.
Better to just trash it, and save on a potential support phone call :-(
So don't put anything past the recovery package designer.
*******
Start with your user manual. Occasionally, they explain the issue
well enough, for you to predict what will happen in advance. Some
laptops now, offer two options. A "nuclear" option, which repartitions,
and sets everything up again to factory state. And a "kinder gentler"
one, that might fix C: only for you.
*******
Your fdisk results suggest you have two storage devices.
I booted a virtual machine here, and I noticed on my sample OS,
that the extended partition had type "5". Now, you have an "sda5",
implying sda5 is a logical in an extended, and yet sda3 isn't
type "5" ? I was expecting to see two partitions, one partition
of type "Extended" (say, sda3), and then a "Logical" after that
(say, sda5), living in the extended.
sdb starts at 2048, and that "smells like an SSD". SSD flash connected
via SATA, are likely to get special treatment, to help align the natural
page size of the flash, to the beginning of the partition. Your sdb might
be a 50GB SSD of some sort. There is no particular reason, for a recovery
tool to go trashing sdb. But that's not the nature of insurance. Since
it's an SSD, you scrupulously back that up anyway. There's nothing like
the shock, of turning on the PC and the SSD is "gone". While an SSD
may have a shock rating of 1000G, from an electronics point of view, they
can behave just as brittle as a mechanical device (in terms of disappearing,
depending on flash defects). So while sdb might be safe from a
recovery DVD perspective, it should still be treated as being just
as flaky as its regular hard drive neighbor /dev/sda.
As another example, occasionally an SSD is offered a "firmware update"
for the processor inside it. Be aware, that some firmware updates,
cause the *entire* contents of the SSD to be erased. The manufacturer
seems to feel no need, for an update to be data preserving.
So that is yet another method to lose data.
Good luck,
Paul
