Toshiba recovery partition

ancient_archer · 2010-08-02 01:11:19

Hello.

About 2 weeks ago, I bought a Toshiba T130-10g notebook which I find quite fine.
In the following weeks I plan to wipe all partitions off except for the 400 MB recovery partition at the start of the disk. Then I´d like to set new partitions and install Windows 7 and then Arch if I settle down the wireleIess and backlight settings problem. I also did a backup of files on the second partition (some HDD recovery) and I did this backup manually (just copied the files on another PC). And I´m going to do a recovery backup via Toshiba recovery media tool on USB.

However, does anyone have real experience with such steps as mentioned above? Will be that easy after setting up new partitions like hitting F8 on startup and reinstall Windows 7 and all the stuff that was bundled with notebook?

Thanks very much for any comments, questions etc.

Inxsible · 2010-08-02 02:15:23

Why do you want to re-install Windows? It most likely came pre-installed. Just shrink the partitions, install Arch and you are good to go.

kgas · 2010-08-02 04:52:37

what i do is create backup disks , test for its functionality then wipe all the partitions and start from scratch.

ancient_archer · 2010-08-03 08:50:48

Well, I'd like to reinstall Windows because I cannnot shrink the C partition as much as I want (despite using some defragmenters..) plus I want to rebuild my system a bit differently...

Thats why Im asking for experience with this thing...

Thanks

ffjia · 2010-08-05 01:40:40

kgas wrote:

what i do is create backup disks , test for its functionality then wipe all the partitions and start from scratch.

Wipe all partitions? Even the recovery partition itself? Can you reinstall windows when you want with this scheme?

kgas · 2010-08-06 13:47:08

windows can be reinstalled but you may not have hidden partition. if you need the recovery partition then you go for norton ghost or use hiren's boot cd. As this is specific to windows I did not mention in details in the previous post.

R00KIE · 2010-08-06 14:06:35

I would resize the windows partition to the smallest size possible and then use dd to copy everything to an image and store it somewhere, disk space is cheap these days.

This copy would include the mbr, the space between the mbr and the first partition, because most probably there is some needed signature stored there to use the recovery dvds/partition and all the partitions. This should be about 20G~30G worth of space (maybe less because your "recovery" partition is only 400MB), this way you're safe in case you ever need to restore everything to the way it came when new.

The other option would be to use sdelete [1] to zero the free space on all partitions (you wouldn't need to resize any existing partitions) and then use dd and gzip to make a compressed image of the whole disk. The zeroed free space should compress well so there isn't much wasted space in the image,

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi … 97443.aspx

Arch Linux

#1 2010-08-02 01:11:19

Toshiba recovery partition

#2 2010-08-02 02:15:23

Re: Toshiba recovery partition

#3 2010-08-02 04:52:37

Re: Toshiba recovery partition

#4 2010-08-03 08:50:48

Re: Toshiba recovery partition

#5 2010-08-05 01:40:40

Re: Toshiba recovery partition

#6 2010-08-06 13:47:08

Re: Toshiba recovery partition

#7 2010-08-06 14:06:35

Re: Toshiba recovery partition

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