[KLUG Members] win98 to kubuntu to win98

[Mike Williams]

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>>>> i was little confused last night because the laptop that i'm working
>>> on is an older compaq armada 
>>>> 100s and it has 250mb primary partition and a the rest is on an ext.
>>> partition. this is standard 
>>>> practice on most compaqs. i tried getting rid of the 250mb restore
>>> partition completely and couldn't.
>>> If I remember correctly, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong,
>>> the Compaq's keep that small partition for utilities like accessing
>>> the BIOS.
>> That is correct. You WANT that partition there, or you won't be able to
>> do much of anything with the system configuration. I had to put one on
>> the drive in mine before I could even start to get Linux in there.
> 
> Yep, if you have a Compaq with a 'hidden' partition you'd best not mess
> with it.  Makes replacing a failed hard drives tons of fun.  I guess
> they didn't want to pay the $1.75 extra a machine to put this code in an
> EPROM.  And why is it 250Mb?  It seems to get bigger with later models
> but doesn't really do anything more...  I suppose you'd need a bank of
> EPROMS to get 256Mb.

Wild guess here, but I think it gets bigger because it's a partition, 
and a partition has to be an integral number of disk cylinders.  If an 
80 Gig drive has 1000 cylinders (for nice round base 10 numbers) then 
the smallest partition you can create is 80 Megs.  Or, the programmers 
could just be getting sloppy with all the resources they have available. 
  Imagine that!