I have a Toshiba laptop, running Vista Home Premium SP2 with AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor, 1 gb ram & 150 gb HDD. I just shrunk the c: drive down to 92 gb to free up 43.5 gb so as to load the Fedora Linux OS into this free space & have a dual-boot configur’n.
My problem is the partition table in the MBR. It shows 4 partitions there, so the fedora Live CD which I use to install the OS cannot find a free spot in the partition table.
I have the Ultimate Boot CD so I took a look at the MBR. Here are the 4 partitions that occupies its table:
1. (no drive letter) – file system: blank – EISA config’n – 1.46 gb – partition type code: x27
2. C: – fs: ntfs – system, boot, active, primary partition – 92.01 gb – code: x07
3. D: – fs: ntfs – primary – 5.98 gb – code: x07
4. (no drive letter) – fs: blank – primary – 5.64 gb – code: x17
c: is 17% free, d: is 99% free, the other two are 100% free
Can you explain what is the purpose of D: ? How about the other two (with no drive letter)? I read somewhere that ‘x17’ code means ‘hidden IFS (ex: HPFS)’ & ‘x27’ means a rescue partition… true?
Would I be safe in replacing the partition table entry for #1, 3 or 4 with an entry for my Linux? (I have an editor that could modify the MBR). Or would it be better to leave MBR alone, put a boot program on a CD or USB stick, which boots Linux from the unallocated ‘partition’? (have to somehow manually install Linux to the 43.5 gb area that I freed up).
I would like vista to be the default & main OS that boots up.
