Chaps, Thanks so much for the useful tips. Yesterday I was feeling optimistic and I tried exactly what I described in my email (that's right, no previous backup apart from used data). What the HP recovery software did is erase my brand new small NTFS partition, then create its own big one. At least, I was happy to see my system running fine after the full re-install, with all my hardware working properly.
Prior to that, I had run the recovery utility without first erasing my partition. The recovery utility tried to do a non destructive recovery (by overwriting all the factory files) instead of the full recovery I ended up doing. This makes me wonder what makes the utility decide between a full recovery with partition and the light one, but that's a different story. I can see different options now: 1. Linux-only system. What the hell, I'm losing interest in all this Microsoft-like tricks and after all I have other Windows machines, lots file conversion filters and Wine. 2. Now that my system is extra clean, try to repartition (without losing the info) with one of your proposed solutions. This is surely the easiest way to have the dual setup (if it works), and I may be investigating it. 3. Try to fool this recovery utility (by installing a basic XP from somewhere in a new NTFS partition) so it tries the light recovery instead of the full one. I suspect this can be very difficult, as it may be checking the integrity of some HP specific stuff (config and ID files?) to decide the kind of recovery. 4. Try to fool this recovery utility into thinking that the hard disk has, say, half the cylinders it has. I'm sure this can be done by putting an inexpensive EPLD between the motherboard and the hard disk, so it answers a different number when asked about its geometry.Really tricky, and still the software in the partition may have been done so it can only be used with a certain HD size (rather stupid). ..I don't want to make a whole project out of this, so I may try 1 or 2, but this stories really piss me off. Thanks for your help, more on my progress to come.. Cheers, Alex __________________________________________________________________ Vodafone te ofrece el primer servicio de mensajería instantánea con todo lo que hasta ahora te ofrecía un messenger clásico, ahora también desde tu móvil. Comunicate o haz nuevos amigos estés donde estés (Web, WAP o SMS), entra en Vodafone Messenger: http://www.vodafone.es/vodafonemessenger y envía ahora todos los SMS que quieras a tus amigos gratis desde la web. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
