Hi
I'm looking for some suggestions here.
My wife wants to try MeeGo linux on Samsung N150 netbook, and that happen to create a major headache for me.
Most issues come from vendor designed 3 primary partition setup of Windows 7:
there is a hidden recovery (15G) followed by system partition (100M) with BCD bootloader and 3rd one is the Win7 itself (120G) guided by standard windows loader. One primary slot left (another 120G used t be here) is enough to organize a boot partition along with root but BCD wont be able to boot anything there.
So my choices are:
First one is not feasible since that would imply no sleep/hibernate functionality for Win7, i been told that they are dependant on bcd functionality being there and there are a lot of posts on quite a few forums claiming that grub/grub2/extlinux have issues with chainloading sleeping windows OS.
Second adds an issue with BIOS handled "F4" key which automatically loads Win7 from recovery when pressed at boot time. That should be resolvable to some degree with editing bcd scripts but they look too complicated to me. Also 15G boot partition is a bit of an overkill.
Third one sound like most hackish and have same BIOS issues of second and more. Particularly i am puzzled by how exactly could make win7 bootable again after getting rid of system partition with bootloader content and moving partitions, considering it is a netbook and i dont have usb dvdrom to boot recovery consle for fixing bcd.
Not sure if EasyBCD can help me with last one - but perhaps i am missing something?
I'm looking for some suggestions here.
My wife wants to try MeeGo linux on Samsung N150 netbook, and that happen to create a major headache for me.
Most issues come from vendor designed 3 primary partition setup of Windows 7:
there is a hidden recovery (15G) followed by system partition (100M) with BCD bootloader and 3rd one is the Win7 itself (120G) guided by standard windows loader. One primary slot left (another 120G used t be here) is enough to organize a boot partition along with root but BCD wont be able to boot anything there.
So my choices are:
- Leave partitions alone and replace bcd by a bootloader that can boot off logical partition
- Get rid of recovery partition, change bcd scripts so they wont use it and use an extra partition to use for /boot while leaving root and swap as logical
- Get rid of recovery and system partitions, move partitions so free space is all together, create primary /boot and whatever else linux wants as logical partitions in extended an then redeploy BCD and reconfigure it so both OSes can boot.
First one is not feasible since that would imply no sleep/hibernate functionality for Win7, i been told that they are dependant on bcd functionality being there and there are a lot of posts on quite a few forums claiming that grub/grub2/extlinux have issues with chainloading sleeping windows OS.
Second adds an issue with BIOS handled "F4" key which automatically loads Win7 from recovery when pressed at boot time. That should be resolvable to some degree with editing bcd scripts but they look too complicated to me. Also 15G boot partition is a bit of an overkill.
Third one sound like most hackish and have same BIOS issues of second and more. Particularly i am puzzled by how exactly could make win7 bootable again after getting rid of system partition with bootloader content and moving partitions, considering it is a netbook and i dont have usb dvdrom to boot recovery consle for fixing bcd.
Not sure if EasyBCD can help me with last one - but perhaps i am missing something?