--- On Tue, 12/1/09, Prof. John C Nash <nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca> wrote: > Have been helping a friend with a new > Lenovo G550 ... wonderful nasties at > Lenovo have put 5 partitions on the drive, plus leaving some > unallocated space. > > As I recall, the structure was > > 1 MB free unallocated > 200 MB NTFS /dev/sda1 > 187 GB NTFS /dev/sda2 > 30 GB NTFS /dev/sda3 (extended) > 30 GB NTFS /dev/sda5 > 14.5 GB NTFS /dev/sda4 > > (with some odd unallocated bits of about 1MB between) > > This, of course, means that one needs to do some work to > set up a Linux partition. On my wife's Asus Eee 1005HA, > there were 4 partitions (C: D: > recovery and winboost), but D: was empty and same size as > C:, so replaced it with Karmic with no fuss. > > Does anyone have a good strategy for dealing with the > Lenovo-style situation, which I fear is more or less a > deliberate setup to block dual boot? This might make a very > good tutorial / advice topic, and of course be beneficial to > the Linux community generally, since many folk are reluctant > to go to all-Linux right away. I find they eventually forget > how to use Windows once they have Linux, but getting them > going means finding convenient ways to set up dual boot. ... I don't think it's just Lenovo. You mention similar partitions on Asus Eee 1005HA. I recently helped someone install Debian Lenny on a Windows Vista desktop that had similar partitions. I don't recall the computer manufacturer and unfortunately didn't note the exact partitions. This machine had a large D: that I shrank down using Lenny and installed Lenny in the room created there and all worked fine. roland