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Question about Partition Table in MBR

By boy33 ·
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. - 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 ? 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.

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Probably a diagnostics or recovery partition

by robo_dev In reply to Question about Partition ...

Most Dell PCs, for example, have a fresh copy of the OS on a separate partition, and by hitting a key-sequence on startup, you can re-image the hard drive.

Also some PCs have a 'media mode' that lets you play DVDs with a lightweight OS installed on a partition.

And sometimes, for whatever reason, disk partition software does strange things like creates a 100Gig partition and then a random leftover 5 gig partition.

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thanks

by boy33 In reply to Probably a diagnostics or ...

yes, looks like others who own toshiba laptops are saying the same thing.

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Small, leftover partition at end of drive.

by seanferd In reply to Probably a diagnostics or ...

Windows creates these.

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